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Chesterton 


DEFENCE  OF  NONSENSE 


CONT'ENTS 


■-  A  Defence  of  Nonsense          .        .  i 

A  Defense  of  Useful  Information  i: 

'*  A  Defence  of  Rash  Vows       .        .  2^ 

A  Defence  of  Farce       ...  37 

A  Defence  of  Baby-Worship           .  4': 

•"    A  Defence  of  Slang        .        .        .  5  S 

A  Defence  of  Humility           .        .  64 

A  Defence  of  Penny  Dreadfuls     .  7 

Maeterlinck 80 

y  On  Lying  in  Bed     ....  9$ 

The.  Little  Birds  Who  Won't  Sing  10 

A  .  ragedy  of  Twopence         .        .  1  r^ 


[V] 

281G6? 


PUBLISHER'S    NOTE 

This  little  volume,  issued  as  a  gift  book 
for  lovers  of  Mr.  Chesterton's  writings,  is 
made  up  from  essays  to  be  found  in  **The 
Defendant,"  "Varied  Types,"  and  "Tre- 
mendous Trifles." 


r" 


A  DEFENCE  OF  N  O  N  S  E  N  S 1 

THERE  are  two  equal  and  eternai  ways 
o 


of  looking  at  this  twilight  world  of 
ours  :  we  may  see  it  as  the  twilight  of  eve.i- 
ing  or  the  twilight  of   morning ;  we  m.-i  y 
think  of  anything,  down  to  a  fallen  acorn, 
as  a  descendant  or  as  an  ancestor.     There 
are  times  when  we  are  almost  crushed,  n(.i 
so  much  with  the  load  of  the  evil  as  wi  ' 
the  load  of  the  goodness  of  humanity,  wh( 
we  feel  that  we  are  nothing  but  the  inhei- 
itors  of  a  humiliating  splendour.     But  there 
are   other   times   when    everything   seen 
primitive,  when  the  ancient  stars  are  only 
sparks  blown  from  a  boy's  bonfire,  whc; 
the  whole  earth  seems  so  young  and  ei 
perimental  that  even  the  white  hair  of  th 
aged,    in   the   fine  biblical  phrase,  is  like, 
almond-trees  that  blossom,  like  the  white 
h;<wt.hora  grown  in  May.     That  it  is  goo-. 

[I] 


;V     :  •^-  )N SENSE 

for  a  mau  ■.  •  .  ■^w/.c;  .>u,^  uc  js/'the  heir  of 
all  the  ages  "  is  pretty  comminly  admitted ; 
it  is  a  less  popular  but  equally  important 
point  that  it  is  good  f©r  him  sometimes  to 
realize  that  hf.  i:  "ot  c-'n-y  '-\a  ancestor,  but 
an  8-.?.e-tcr  Oi  primal  antiquity ;  it  is  good 
for  him  to  wonder  whether  he  is  not  a  hero, 
and  to  experience  ennobling  doubts  as  to 
whether  he  is  not  a  solar  myth. 

The  matters  which  most  thoroughly  evoke 
this  sense  of  the  abiding  childhood  of  the 
world  are  those  which  are  really  fresh,  ab- 
rupt and  inventive  in  any  age  ;  and  if  we 
were  asked  what  was  the  best  proof  of  this 
adventurous  youth  in  the  nineteenth  century 
we  should  say,  with  all  respect  to  its  por- 
tentous sciences  and  philosophies,  that  it 
was  to  be  found  in  the  rhymes  of  Mr. 
Edward  Lear  and  in  the  literature  of  non- 
>ense.f  "The  Dong  with  the  Luminous 
Nose,"  at  least,  is  original,  as  the  first  sUip 
md  the  first  plough  ^  •-''  Ai-i-.rinal 

[ 


A   Defence  of   Nonsense 

t  It  is  true  in  a  certain  sense  that  some  of 
the  greatest  writers  the  world  has  seen — 
Aristophanes,  Rabelais  and  Sterne — have 
written  nonsense  ;  but  unless  we  are  mis- 
taken, it  is  in  a  widely  different  sense. 
The  nonsense  of  these  men  was  satiric — 
that  is  to  say,  symbolic ;  it  was  a  kind  c* 
exuberant  capering  round  a  discovered 
truth.  There  is  all  the  difference  in  th  ? 
world  between  the  instinct  of  satire,  whicl  , 
seeing  in  the  Kaiser's  moustaches  som(  • 
thing  typical  of  him,  draws  them  contini 
ally  larger  and  larger;  and  the  instinct  o: 
nonsense  which,  for  no  reason  whatever 
imagines  what  those  moustaches  wou!  I 
look  like  on  the  present  Archbishop  u . 
Canterbury  if  he  grew  them  in  a  fit  of  ab 
sence  of  mind.  We  incline  to  think  thr.: 
no  flf^^  "  ^  ept  our  own  could  have  under- 
stood that  the  Quangle-Wangle  meant  ab 
•nothing,  onr^  +v,o  Lands  of  the  Jum- 
-re  absolu:ei\     .where.     We  fane- 

[3] 


A    Defence   of    Nonsense 

that  if  the  account  of  the  knave's  trial  in 
"  Alice  in  Wonderland  "  had  been  published 
in  the  seventeenth  century  it  would  have 
been  bracketed  with  Bunyan's  "Trial  of 
Faithful ''  as  a  parody  on  the  State  prose- 
cutions of  the  time.  We  fancy  that  if 
'The  Dong  with  the  Luminous  Nose" 
had  appeared  in  the  same  period  every  one 
would  have  called  it  a  dull  satire  on  Oliver 
Cromwell. 

It     is     altogether     advisedly     that     we 

q  ote     chiefly    from  Mr.     Lear's    "  Non- 

ase  Rhymes."     To  our  mind  he  is  both 

/ronologically  and    essentially  the    father 

nonsense;    we    think   him    superior   to 

1.  jwis     Carroll.     In    one    sense,    indeed, 

'..  3wis  Carroll  has  a  great  advantage.     We 

know  what  Lewis  Carroll  was  in  daily  life : 

he  was  a  singularly  serious  and  conventional 

don,  universallv  respected*  but  very  much 

of  a  pedant  a^  >      ..mething  of  a  Philistiic; 

Fius  his  strange  double  life  in  earth  and  in 

[4] 


A   De'fence  of   Nonsense 

dreamland  emphasizes  the  idea  that  lies  £' 
the  back  of  nonsense — the  idea  of  escape. 
of  escape  into  a  world  where  things  are  nc ' 
fixed  horribly    in   an   eternal    appropriate- 
ness, where  apples  grow  on  pear-trees,  ana 
any  odd  man  you  meet  may  have  three  legj , 
Lewis  Carroll,  living  one  life  in  which  he 
would  have  thundered   morally  against  any 
one  who  walked  on  the  wrong  plot  of  gras-, 
and  another  life  in  which  he  would  chee; 
fully  call  the  sun  green  and  the  moon  blu^ 
was,   by  his  very  divided   nature,  his  or 
foot  on  both  worlds,  a  perfect  type  of  the 
position  of  modern  nonsense.     His  Woa« 
derland  is  a  country  populated  by  insane 
mathematicians.     We  feel  the  whole  is  an 
escape  into  a  world  of  masquerade;  we  feci 
that  if  we  conld  pierce  their  disguises,  v,  e 
might  discover  that   Humpty   Dumpty  and 
the    March    Hare    were    Professors    ard 
Doctors    of    Divinity    enjoying    a    mental 
holiday      "^'  ■      3nse  of  escape  is  certain-.' 
[5] 


A   Defence  of   Nonsense 

less  emphatic  in  Edward  Lear,  because  of 
fie  completeness  of  his  citizenship  in  the 
v/orld  of  unreason.  We  do  not  know  his 
r.rosaic  biography  as  we  know  Lewis 
Carroll's.  We  accept  him  as  a  purely 
fabulous  figure,  on  his  own  description  of 
himself: 

"  His  body  is  perfectly  spherical, 
He  weareth  a  runcible  hat." 

While  Lewis  Carroll's  Wonderland  is 
purely  intellectual,  Lear  introduces  quite 
another  element — the  element  of  the  po- 
etical and  even  emotional.  Carroll  works 
by  the  pure  reason,  but  this  is  not  so  strong 
a  contrast;  for,  after  all,  mankind  in  thv- 
main  has  always  regarded  reason  as  a  bit 
of  a  joke.fLear  introduces  his  unmeaning 
words  and  his  amorphou':  creatures  not 
with  the  pomp  of  reason,  but  wit;. 
mantic  prelude  '^f  rich  hues  and  hauntl-i;! 

rhythms.  ' 

[  6  ] 


A   De.fence  of   Nonsense 

"  Far  and  few,  far  and  few, 

Are  the  lands  where  the  Jumblies  live," 

is  an  entirely  different  type  of  poetry  to 
that  exhibited  in  "  Jabberwocky."  Car- 
roll, with  a  sense  of  mathematical  neatness, 
makes  his  whole  poem  a  mosaic  of  new  and 
mysterious  words.  But\Edward  Lear,  with 
ifiwe  subtle  and  placid  effrontery,  is  always 
introducing  scraps  of  his  own  elvish  dialect 
^  into  the  middle  of  simple  and  rational  state- 
^  ments,  until  we  are  almost  stunned  into 
admitting  that  we  know  what  they  mean.. 
There  is  a  genial  ring  of  common  sense 
about  such  lines  as, 

"  For  his  aunt  Jobiska  said  « Every  one  knows 
That  a  Pobble  is  better  without  his  toes,'  " 

■\Yhich  is  beyond  the  reach  of  Carroti.  The 
poet  seems  so  easy  on  the  matter  that  we 
are  almost  driven  to  pretend  that  we  see  his 
meaning,  that  we  know  the  peculiar  diffi- 
culties of  a  Pobble,  that  we  are  as  old  travel- 
lers in  the  "  Gromboolian  Pla*  "  as  he  is. 
'    [7] 


A   De>ence  of   Nonsense 

Our  claim  that  nonsense  is  a  new  litera- 
t.re  (we  might  almost  say  a  new  sense) 
v/ould  be  quite  indefensible  if  nonsense 
vera  nothing  more  than  a  mere  aesthetic 
f  acy.  Nothing  sublimely  artistic  has  ever 
f  isen  out  of  mere  art,  any  more  than 
■  lything    essentially   reasonable    has   ever 

isen  out  of  the  pure  reason.     There  must  ' 
a  ways  be  a  rich  moral  soil  for  any  great  I 
arsthetic  growth.     The  principle  of  art  fori 
art's   sake    is   a   very  good   principle  if  it 
means  that  there  is  a  vital  distinction  be- 
;  veen  the  earth  and  the  tree  that  has  its 
roots  in  the  earth ;    but  it  is  a  very  bad 
principle   if  it    means  that  the  tree  could 
,  row  just  as  well  with  its  roots  in  the  air^ 
.'  Ivery  great  literature  has  always  been  alle- 
orical — allegorical    of   some    view   of  the 
whole  universe.     The  "  Iliad  "  is  only  great 
cecause  all  life  is  a  battle,  the  "  Odyssey" 
•  ecause  all  life  is  a  journey,  the   Book  of 
job  because  all   life  is  a  riddle.     There  is 


A   Defence  of   Nonsense 

one   attitude   in   which  we   think   that  all 
existence    is    summed    up    in    the    wok' 
•'ghosts";   another,  and  somewhat  bett(       • 
one,  in  which  we  think,  it  is   summed   up 
in    the    words    "A    Midsummer    Night'i 
Dream."     Even   the  vulgarest   melodrama 
or  detective   story  can  be  good  if  it  ex 
presses  something  of  the  delight  in  siniste- 
possibilities — the  healthy  lust  for  darknes 
and  terror  which  may  come  on  us  any  nigh    " 
in  walking  down  a  dark  lane.     If,  thefefere 
nonsense  is  really  to  be  the  literature  of  the 
future,  it  must  have  its  own  version  of  the 
Cosmos  to  offer;  the  world  must  not  only 
be   the   tragic,   romantic,  and  religious,  it 
must  be  nonsensical  also.j  And  here  we     | 
fancy  that  nonsense  will,  in  a  very  unex- 
pected way,  come  to  the  aid  of  the  spiritual 
view  of  things.     Religion  has  for  centuries 
been    trying    to   make   men   exult   in   the 
"wonders"   of  creation,    but   it   has   for- 
gotten tb''*  a  thing  cannot  be  completely 

[9] 


A  Defence  of   Nonsense 

wonderful  so  long  as  it  remains  sensible. 
So  long  as  we  regard  a  tree  as  an  obvious 
thing,  naturally  and  reasonably  created  for  a 
giraffe  to  eat,  we  cannot  properly  wonder  at 
it.  It  is  when  we  consider  it  as  a  prodig- 
ious wave  of  the  living  soil  sprawling  up  to 
the  skies  for  no  reason  in  particular  that  we 
take  off  our  hats,  to  the  astonishment  of  the 
park-keeper.  Everything  has  in  fact  another 
side  to  it,  like  the  moon,  the  patroness  of 
nonsense.  Viewed  from  that  other  side, 
a  bird  is  a  blossom  broken  loose  from  its 
chain  of  stalk,  a  man  a  quadruped  begging 
on  its  hind  legs,  a  house  a  gigantesque  hat 
to  cover  a  man  from  the  sun,  a  chair  an 
apparatus  of  four  wooden  legs  for  a  cripple 
with  only  two. 


This  is  the  side  of  things  which  tends 
most  truly  to  spiritual  wonder.  It  is  sig- 
nificant that  in  the  greatest  religious  poem 
existent,  the  Book  of  Job,  the  argument 
which  convinces  the  in  fide'  •«  not  (as  has 
[lo] 


A   Defence   of   Nonsense 

been  represented  by  the  merely  rational 
religionism  of  the  eighteenth  century)  a 
picture  of  the  ordered  beneficence  of  the 
Creation;  but,  on  the  contrary,  a  picture 
of  the  huge  and  undecipherable  unreason  of 
it.  **  Hast  Thou  sent  the  rain  upon  the 
desert  where  no  man  is?"  This  simple 
sense  of  wonder  at  the  shapes  of  things, 
and  at  their  exuberant  independence  of 
our  intellectual  standards  and  our  trivial 
definitions,  is  the  basis  of  spirituality  as  it 
is  the  basis  of  nonsense.  Nonsense  and 
faith  (strange  as  the  conjunction  may  seem) 
are  the  two  supreme  symbolic  assertions  of 
the  truth  that  to  H'-aw  out  the  soul  of  things 
with  a  syllogism  is  as  impossible  as  to  draw 
out  Leviatiian  w'th  a  hook.  The  well- 
meaning  person  who,  by  merely  studying 
the  logical  side  o:"  things,  has  decided  that 
'^  faith  is  nonsense,"  does  not  know  how 
.  fuiy  he  speaks ;  later  it  may  come  back  to 
..ira  in  the  form  that  nonsense  is  faith. 

["] 


A    DEFENCE   OF    USEFUL 
INFORMATION 

IT  is  natural  and  proper  enough  that  the 
masses  of  explosive  ammunition  stored 
up  in  detective  stories  and  the  replete  and 
solid  sweet-stuff  shops  vi^hich  are  called 
sentimental  novelettes  should  be  popular 
with  the  ordinary  customer.  It  is  not  dif- 
ficult to  realize  that  all  of  us,  ignordiil  or 
cultivated,  are  primarily  interested  in  mur- 
der and  love-making.  The  really  extraor- 
dinary thing  is  that  the  most  appalling  fic- 
tions are  not  actually  so  popuh  r  ^s  that 
literature  which  deals  with  the  most  undis- 
puted and  depressing  facts.  M  a  are  not 
apparently  so  interested  in  mi  der  and 
love-making  as  they  are  in  the  i  mber  o( 
different  forms  of  latchkey  whic  exist  in' 
London  or  the  time  that  it  woi 


A  Defence  of  Useful  Information 

grasshopper  to  jump  from  Cairo  to  the 
Cape.  The  enormous  mass  of  fatuous  and 
useless  truth  which  fills  the  most  widely- 
circulated  papers,  such  as  Tit-Bits^  Science 
Si/tings,  and  many  of  the  illustrated  maga- 
zines, is  certainly  one  of  the  most  extraor- 
dinary kinds  of  emotional  and  mental  pabu- 
lum on  which  man  ever  fed.  It  is  almost 
incredible  that  these  preposterous  statistics 
should  actually  be  more  popular  than  the 
most  blood-curdling  mysteries  and  the  most 
luxurious  debauches  of  sentiment.  To  im- 
agine it  is  like  imagining  the  humorous 
passages  in  Bradshaw's  Railway  Guide 
read  aloud  on  winter  evenings.  It  is  like 
conceiving  a  man  unable  to  put  down  an 
advertisement  of  Mother  Seigel's  Syrup  be- 
cause he  wished  to  know  what  eventually 
happened  to  the  young  man  who  was  ex- 
tremely ill  at  Edinburgh.  In  the  case  of 
cheap  detective  stories  and  cheap  novel- 
ettes, we  can  most  of  us  feel,  whatever  our 

[•3] 


A  Defence  of  Useful  Informatioh 

degree  of  education,  that  it  might  be  possi- 
ble to  read  them  if  we  gave  full  indulgence  to 
a  lower  and  more  facile  part  of  our  natures  ; 
at  the  worst  we  feel  that  we  might  enjoy 
them  as  we  might  enjo}'  bull-baiting  or 
getting  drunk.  But  the  literature  of  in- 
formation is  absolutely  mysterious  to  us. 
We  can  no  more  think  of  amusing  ourselves 
with  it  than  of  reading  whole  pages  of  a  Sur- 
biton  local  directory.  To  read  such  things 
would  not  be  a  piece  of  vulgar  indulgence  ; 
it  would  be  a  highly  arduous  and  meritori- 
ous enterprise.  It  is  this  fact  which  consti- 
tutes a  profound  and  almost  unfathomable 
interest  in  this  particular  branch  of  popular 
literature. 

Primarily,  at  least,  there  is  one  rather 
peculiar  thing  which  must  in  justice  be 
said  about  it.  The  readers  of  this  strange 
science  must  be  allowed  to  be,  upon  the 
whole,  as  dismterested  as  a  prophet  see- 
ing visions  or  a  child  reading  fairy-tales. 
[14] 


A  Defence  of  Useful  Information 

Here,  again,  we  find,  as  we  so  often  do,  that 
whatever  view  of  this  matter  of  popular 
literature  we  can  trust,  we  can  trust  least 
of  all  the  comment  and  censure  current 
among  the  vulgar  educated.  The  ordinary 
version  of  the  ground  of  this  popularity  for 
information,  which  would  be  given  by  a 
person  of  greater  cultivation,  would  be  that 
common  men  are  chiefly  interested  in  those 
sordid  facts  that  surround  them  on  every 
side.  A  very  small  degree  of  examination 
will  show  us  that  whatever  ground  there  is 
for  the  popularity  of  these  insane  encyclo- 
paedias, it  cannot  be  the  ground  of  utility. 
The  version  of  life  given  by  a  penny  novel- 
ette may  be  very  moonstruck  and  unreliable, 
but  it  is  at  least  more  likely  to  contain  facts 
relevant  to  daily  life  than  computations  on 
the  subject  of  the  number  of  cows'  tails 
that  would  reach  the  North  Pole.  There 
are  many  more  people  who  are  in  love  than 
there  are  people  who  have  any  intention  of 

[15] 


A  Defence  of  Useful  Information 

counting  or  collecting  cows'  tails.  It  is 
evident  to  me  that  the  grounds  of  this  wide- 
spread madness  of  information  for  informa- 
tion's sake  must  be  sought  in  other  and 
deeper  parts  of  human  nature  than  those 
daily  needs  which  lie  so  near  the  surface  that 
even  social  philosophers  have  discovered 
them  somewhere  in  that  profound  and 
eternal  instinct  for  enthusiasm  and  minding 
other  people's  business  which  made  great 
popular  movements  like  the  Crusades  or 
the  Gordon  Riots. 

"  I  once  had  the  pleasure  of  knowing  a 
man  who  actually  talked  in  private  life  after 
the  manner  of  these  papers.  His  conversa- 
tion consisted  of  fragramentary  statements 
about  height  and  weight  and  depth  and 
time  and  population,  and  his  conversation 
was  a  nightmare  of  dullness.  During  the 
shortest  pause  he  would  ask  whether  his 
interlocutors  were  aware  how  many  tons  of 
rust  were  scraped  every  year  off  the  Menai 
[i6] 


A  Defence  of  Useful  Information 

Bridge,  and  how  many  rival  shops  Mr. 
Whiteley  had  bought  up  since  he  opened 
his  business.  The  attitude  of  his  acquaint- 
ances towards  this  inexhaustible  enter- 
tainer varied  according  to  his  presence  or 
absence  between  indifference  and  terror. 
It  was  frightful  to  think  of  a  man's  brain 
being  stocked  with  such  inexpressibly  profit- 
less treasures.  It  was  like  visiting  some 
imposing  British  Museum  and  finding  its 
galleries  and  glass  cases  filled  with  speci- 
mens of  London  mud,  of  common  mortar, 
of  broken  walking-sticks  and  cheap  tobacco. 
Years  afterwards  I  discovered  that  this 
intolerable  prosaic  bore  had  been,  in  fact,  a 
poet.  I  learnt  that  every  item  of  this  multi- 
tudinous information  was  totally  and  un- 
blushingly  untrue,  that  for  all  I  knew  he 
had  made  it  up  as  he  went  along  ;  that  no 
tons  of  rust  are  scraped  off  the  Menai 
Bridge,  and  that  the  rival  tradesmen  and 
Mr.  Whiteley  were  creatures  of  the  poet's 

[17] 


A  Defence  of  Useful  Information 

brain.  Instantly  I  conceived  consuming 
respect  for  the  man  who  was  so  circum- 
stantial, so  monotonous,  so  entirely  pur- 
poseless a  liar.  With  him  it  must  have 
been  a  case  of  art  for  art's  sake.  The  joke 
sustained  so  gravely  through  a  respected 
lifetime  was  of  that  order  of  joke  which  is 
shar  jd  with  omniscience.  But  what  struck 
me  more  cogently  upon  reflection  was  the 
fact  that  these  immeasurable  trivialities, 
which  had  struck  me  as  utterly  vulgar  and 
arid  when  I  thought  they  were  true,  imme- 
diately became  picturesque  and  almost 
brilliant  when  I  thought  they  were  in- 
ventions of  the  human  fancy.  And  here, 
as  it  seems  to  me,  I  laid  my  finger  upon  a 
fundamental  quality  of  the  cultivated  class 
which  prevents  it,  and  will,  perhaps,  always 
prevent  it  from  seeing  with  the  eyes  of 
popular  imagination.  The  merely  educated 
can  scarcely  ever  be  brought  to  believe 
that  this  world  is  itself  an  interesting  place. 
[i8] 


A  Defence  of  Useful  Information 

When  they  look  at  a  work  of  art,  good  or 
bad,  they  expect  to  be  interested,  but  when 
they  look  at  a  newspaper  advertisement  or 
a  group  in  the  street,  they  do  not,  properly 
and  literally  speaking,  expect  to  be  in- 
terested. But  to  common  and  simple  peo- 
ple this  world  is  a  work  of  art,  though 
it  is,  like  many  great  works  of  art,  ^.nony- 
mous.  They  look  to  life  for  interest  with 
the  same  kind  of  cheerful  and  uneradicable 
assurance  with  which  we  look  for  interest 
at  a  comedy  for  which  we  have  paid  money 
at  the  door.  To  the  eyes  of  the  ultimate 
school  of  contemporary  fastidiousness,  the 
universe  is  indeed  an  ill-drawn  and  over- 
coloured  picture,  the  scrawlings  in  circles 
of  a  baby  upon  the  slate  of  night ;  its  starry 
skies  are  a  vulgar  pattern  which  they  would 
not  have  for  a  wallpaper,  its  flowers  and 
fruits  have  a  cockney  brilliancy,  like  the 
holiday  hat  of  a  flower-girl.  Hence,  de- 
graded by  art  to  its  own  level,  they  have 

[19] 


A  Defence  of  Useful  Information 

lost  altogether  that  primitive  and  typical 
taste  of  man — the  taste  for  news.  By  this 
essential  taste  for  news,  I  mean  the  pleasure 
in  hearing  the  mere  fact  that  a  man  has  died 
at  the  age  of  no  in  South  Wales,  or  that 
the  horses  ran  away  at  a  funeral  in  San 
Francisco.  Large  masses  of  the  early  faiths 
and  politics  of  the  world,  numbers  of  the 
miracles  and  heroic  anecdotes,  are  based 
primarily  upon  this  love  of  something  that 
has  just  happened,  this  divine  institu- 
tion of  gossip.  When  Christianity  was 
named  the  good  news,  it  spread  rapidly,  not 
only  because  it  was  good,  but  also  because 
it  was  news.  So  it  is  that  if  any  of  us  have 
ever  spoken  to  a  navvy  in  a  train  about 
the  daily  paper,  we  have  generally  found 
the  navvy  interested,  not  in  those  struggles 
of  Parliaments  and  trades  unions  which 
sometimes  are,  and  are  always  supposed  to 
be,  for  his  benefit  ;  but  in  the  fact  that  an 
unusually  large  whale  has  been  washed  up 

[20] 


A  Defence  of  Useful  Information 

on  the  coast  of  Orkney,  or  that  some  lead- 
ing millionaire  like  Mr.  Harmsworth  is 
reported  to  break  a  hundred  pipes  a  year. 
The  educated  classes,  cloyed  and  demoral- 
ized with  the  mere  indulgence  of  art  and 
mood,  can  no  longer  understand  the  idle 
and  splendid  disinterestedness  of  the  reader 
of  Pearsons  Weekly.  He  still  keeps  some- 
thing of  that  feeling  which  should  be  the 
birthright  of  men — the  feeling  that  this  planet 
is  like  a  new  house  into  which  we  have  just 
moved  our  baggage.  Any  detail  of  it  has 
a  value,  and,  with  a  truly  sportsmanlike  in- 
stinct, the  average  man  takes  most  pleasure 
in  the  details  which  are  most  complicated, 
irrelevant,  and  at  once  difficult  and  useless 
to  discover.  Those  parts  of  the  newspaper 
which  announce  the  giant  gooseberry  and 
the  raining  frogs  are  really  the  modern 
representatives  of  the  popular  tendency 
which  produced  the  hydra  and  the  were- 
wolf and   the   dog-headed  men.     Folk  in 

[21] 


A  Defence  of  Useful  Information 

the  Middle  Ages  were  not  interested  in  a 
dragon  or  a  glimpse  of  the  devil  because 
they  thought  that  it  was  a  beautiful  prose 
idyll,  but  because  they  thought  that  it  had 
really  just  been  seen.  It  was  not  like  so 
much  artistic  literature,  a  refuge  indicating 
the  dullness  of  the  world  :  it  was  an  incident 
pointedly  illustrating  the  fecund  poetry  of 
the  world. 

That  much  can  be  said,  and  is  said, 
against  the  literature  of  information,  I  do 
not  for  a  moment  deny.  It  is  shapeless,  it 
is  trivial,  it  may  give  an  unreal  air  of  knowl- 
edge, it  unquestionably  lies  along  with  the 
rest  of  popular  literature  under  the  general 
indictment  that  it  may  spoil  the  chance  of 
better  work,  certainly  by  wasting  time, 
possibly  by  ruining  taste.  But  these  obvi- 
ous objections  are  the  objections  which  we 
hear  so  persistently  from  everyone  that  one 
cannot  help  wondering  where  the  papers  in 
question  procure  their  myriads  of  readers. 


A  Defence  of  Useful  Information 

The  natural  necessity  and  natural  good  un- 
derlying such  crude  institutions  is  far  less 
often  a  subject  of  speculation ;  yet  the 
healthy  hungers  which  lie  at  the  back  of  the 
habits  of  modern  democracy  are  surely 
worthy  of  the  same  sympathetic  study  that 
we  give  to  the  dogmas  of  the  fanatics  long 
dethroned  and  the  intrigues  of  common- 
wealths long  obliterated  from  the  earth. 
And  this  is  the  base  and  consideration 
which  I  have  to  offer :  that  perhaps  the 
taste  for  shreds  and  patches  of  journalistic 
science  and  history  is  not,  as  is  continually 
asserted,  the  vulgar  and  senile  curiosity  of 
a  people  that  has  grown  old,  but  simply  the 
babyish  and  indiscriminate  curiosity  of  a 
people  still  young  and  entering  history  for 
the  first  time.  In  other  words,  I  suggest  that 
they  only  tell  each  other  in  magazines  the 
same  kind  of  stories  of  commonplace  por- 
tents and  conventional  eccentricities  which, 
in  any  case,  they  would  tell  each  other  in 

[23] 


A  Defence  of  Useful  Information 

taverns.  Science  itself  is  only  the  exag- 
geration and  specialization  of  this  thirst  for 
useless  fact,  which  is  the  mark  of  the  youth 
of  man.  But  science  has  become  strangely 
separated  from  the  mere  news  and  scandal 
of  flowers  and  birds  ;  men  have  ceased  to 
see  that  a  pterodactyl  was  as  fresh  and 
natural  as  a  flower,  that  a  flower  is  as  mon- 
troub  as  a  pterodactyl.  The  rebuilding  of 
this  bridge  between  science  and  human  na- 
ture is  one  of  the  greatest  needs  of  man- 
kind. We  have  all  to  show  that  before  we 
go  on  to  any  visions  or  creations  we  can  be 
contented  with  a  planet  of  miracles. 


[24] 


A  DEFENCE  OF  RASH  VOWS 

IF  a  prosperous  modern  man,  with  a  high 
hat  and  a  frock-coat,  were  to  solemnly 
pledge  himself  before  all  his  clerks  and 
friends  to  count  the  leaves  on  every  third 
tree  in  Holland  Walk,  to  hop  up  to  the  City 
on  one  leg  every  Thursday,  to  repeat  the 
whole  of  Mill's  *' Liberty"  seventy-six 
times,  to  collect  300  dandelions  in  fields 
belonging  to  any  one  of  the  name  of  Brown, 
to  remain  for  thirty-one  hours  holding  his 
left  ear  in  his  right  hand,  to  sing  the  names 
of  all  his  aunts  in  order  of  age  on  the  top 
of  an  omnibus,  or  make  any  such  unusual 
undertaking,  we  should  immediately  con- 
clude that  the  man  was  mad,  or,  as  it  is 
sometimes  expressed,  was  '*  an  artist  in 
life."  Yet  these  vows  are  not  more  extra- 
ordinary than  the  "'^"- -  "M^y,  \x  :'..     vliddle 


A   Defence  of   Rash  Vows 

Ages  and  In  similar  periods  were  made, 
not  by  fanatics  merely,  but  by  the  greatest 
figures  in  civic  and  national  civilization — 
by  kings,  judges,  poets,  and  priests.  One 
man  sw^ore  to  chain  two  mountains  to- 
gether, and  the  great  chain  hung  there,  it 
was  said,  for  ages  as  a  monument  of  that 
mystical  folly.  Another  swore  that  he 
would  find  his  way  to  Jerusalem  with  a 
patch  over  his  eyes,  and  died  looking  for 
it.  It  is  not  easy  to  see  that  these  two  ex- 
ploits, judged  from  a  strictly  rational  stand- 
point, are  any  saner  than  the  acts  above 
suggested.  A  mountain  is  commonly  a 
stationary  and  reliable  object  which  it  is 
not  necessary  to  chain  up  at  night  like  a 
dog.  And  it  is  not  easy  at  first  sight  to  see 
that  a  man  pays  a  very  high  compliment  to 
the  Holy  City  by  setting  out  for  it  under 
conditions  which  render  it  to  the  last  de- 
gree improbable  that  he  will  ever  get  there. 
But  about  this  there  is  one  striking  thing 
[26] 


A   Defence   of   Rash   Vows 

to  be  noticed.  If  men  behaved  in  that  way 
in  our  time,  we  should,  as  we  have  saiJ. 
regard  them  as  symbols  of  the  *'  de 
cadence."  But  the  men  who  did  these 
things  were  not  decadent ;  they  belonged 
generally  to  the  most  robust  classes  of  what 
is  generally  regarded  as  a  robust  age. 
Again,  it  will  be  urged  that  if  men  essen- 
tially sane  performed  such  insanities,  it  was 
under  the  capricious  direction  of  a  super- 
stitious religious  system.  This,  again,  will 
not  hold  water ;  for  in  the  purely  terrestrial 
and  even  sensual  departments  of  life,  such 
as  love  and  lust,  the  mediaeval  princes  show 
the  same  mad  promises  and  performances, 
the  same  misshapen  imagination  and  the 
same  monstrous  self-sacrifice.  Here  w^- 
have  a  contradiction,  to  explain  which  it  is 
necessary  to  think  of  the  whole  nature  of 
vows  from  the  beginning.  And  if  we  con- 
sider seriously  and  correctly  the  nature  of 
vows,  we  shall,  unless  I  am  much  mistaken, 

[27] 


A   Defence  of   Rash   Vows 

come  to  the  conclusion  that  it  is  perfectly 
sane,  and  even  sensible,  to  swear  to  chain 
mountains  together,  and  that,  if  insanity  is  in- 
volved at  all,  it  is  a  little  insane  not  to  do  so. 
The  man  who  makes  a  vov^r  makes  an 
appointment  with  himself  at  some  distant 
time  or  place.  The  danger  of  it  is  that 
himself  should  not  keep  the  appointment. 
And  in  modern  times  this  terror  of  one's 
self,  of  the  weakness  and  mutability  of 
one's  self,  has  pcclUusly  increased,  and  is 
the  real  basis  of  the  objection  to  vows  of 
any  kind.  A  modern  man  refrains  from 
swearing  to  count  the  leaves  on  every  third 
vree  in  Holland  Walk,  not  because  it  is 
^.'|1y  to  do  so  (he  does  many  sillier  things), 
but  because  he  has  a  profound  conviction 
that  before  he  had  got  to  the  three  hundred 
and  seventy-ninth  leaf  on  the  first  tree  he 
would  be  excessively  tired  of  the  subject 
and  want  to  go  home  to  tea.  In  other 
words,  we  fear  that  by  that  time  he  will  be, 

[28] 


A   DEFENCVi   OF   Rash   Vows 

in  the  common  but  hideously  significant 
phrase,  another  man.  Now,  it  is  this  hor- 
rible fairy-taic  oi  a  man  constantly  changing 
into  other  men  that  is  the  soul  of  the  de- 
cadence. That  John  Paterson  should,  with 
apparent  calm,  look  forward  to  being  a  cer- 
tain General  Barker  on  Monday,  Dr.  Mac- 
gregor  on  Tuesday,  Sir  Walter  Carstairs 
on  Wednesday,  and  Sam  Slugg  on  Thurs- 
day, may  seem  a  nightmare  ;  but  to  that 
nightmare  we  give  the  name  of  modern 
culture.  One  great  decadent,  who  is  now 
dead,  published  a  poem  some  time  ago,  in 
which  he  powerfully  summed  up  the  whole 
spirit  of  the  movement  by  declaring  that  h 
could  stand  in  the  prison  yard  and  entirely 
comprehend  the  feelings  of  a  man  about  to 
be  hanged  : 

"  For  he  that  lives  more  lives  than  one 
More  deaths  than  one  must  die." 

And  the  end  of  all  this  is  that  maddening 
horror   of  unreality  which  descends  upon 
[^9] 


/V<^ 


A   Defence   of   Rash   Vows 

the  decadents,  md  compared  with  which 
physical  pain  its^xi  would  have  the  freshness 
of  a  youthful  thing.  The  one  hell  which 
imagination  must  conceive  as  most  hellish 
is  to  be  eternally  acting  a  play  without  even 
the  narrowest  and  dirtiest  greenroom  in 
which  to  be  human.  And  this  is  the  con- 
dition of  the  decadent,  of  the  aesthete,  of 
the  free-lover.  To  be  everlastingly  pass- 
ing through  dangers  which  we  know  cannot 
scathe  us,  to  be  taking  oaths  which  we 
know  cannot  bind  us,  to  be  defying  ene- 
mies who  we  know  cannot  conquer  us — 
this  is  the  grinning  tyranny  of  decadence 
which  is  called  freedom. 
,  Let  us  turn,  on  the  other  hand,  to  the 
maker  of  vows.  The  man  who  made  a 
vow,  however  wild,  gave  a  healthy  and 
natural  expression  to  the  greatness  of  a 
great  moment.  He  vowed,  for  example, 
to  chain  two  mountains  together,  perhaps 
a  symbol  of  some  great  relief,  or  love,  or 

[3°] 


A   Defence  of   Rash   Vows 

aspiration.  Short  as  the  moment  of  his 
resolve  might  be,  it  was,  like  all  great  mo- 
ments, a  moment  of  immortality,  and  the 
desire  to  say  of  it  exegi  monumentum  cere 
perennius  was  the  only  sentiment  that  would 
satisfy  his  mind.  The  modern  aesthetic 
man  would,  of  course,  easily  see  the  emo- 
tional opportunity  ;  he  would  vow  to  chain 
two  mountains  together.  But,  then,  he 
would  quite  as  cheerfully  vow  to  chain  the 
earth  to  the  moon.  And  the  withering 
consciousness  that  he  did  not  mean  what 
he  said,  that  he  was,  in  truth,  saying  noth- 
ing of  any  great  import,  would  take  from 
him  exactly  that  sense  of  daring  actuality 
which  is  the  excitement  of  a  vow.  For 
what  could  be  more  maddening  than  an  ex- 
istence in  which  our  mother  or  aunt  re- 
ceived the  information  that  we  were  going 
to  assassinate  the  King  or  build  a  temple 
on  Ben  Nevis  with  the  genial  composure 
of  custom  ? 

[31] 


A   Defence   of   Rash   Vows 

The  revolt  against  vows  has  been  carried 
in  our  day  even  to  the  extent  of  a  revolt 
against  the  typical  vow  of  marriage.  It  is 
most  amusing  to  listen  to  the  opponents  of 
marriage  on  this  subject.  They  appear  to 
imagine  that  the  ideal  of  constancy  was  a 
yoke  mysteriously  imposed  on  mankind  by 
the  devil,  instead  of  being,  as  it  is,  a  yoke 
consistently  imposed  by  all  lovers  on  them- 
selves. They  have  invented  a  phrase,  a 
phrase  that  is  a  black  and  white  contradic- 
tion in  two  words — "free-love" — as  if  a 
lover  ever  had  been,  or  ever  could  be,  free. 
It  is  the  nature  of  love  to  bind  itself,  and 
the  institution  of  marriage  merely  paid  the 
average  man  the  compliment  of  taking  him 
at  his  word.  Modern  sages  offer  to  the 
lover,  with  an  ill-flavoured  grin,  the  largest 
liberties  and  the  fullest  irresponsibility ; 
but  they  do  not  respect  him  as  the  old 
Church  respected  him  ;  they  do  not  write 
his  oath  upon  the  heavens,  as  the  record  of 
[3^] 


A    Defence   of   Rash   Vows 

his  highest  moment.  They  give  him  every 
liberty  except  the  liberty  to  sell  his  liberty, 
which  is  the  only  one  that  he  wants. 

In    Mr.    Bernard   Shaw's   brilliant   play 
*'  The  Philanderer,"  we  have  a  vivid  picture 
of  this  state  of  things.     Charteris  is  a  man 
perpetually  endeavouring  to  be  a  free-lover, 
which  is  like  endeavouring  to  be  a  married 
bachelor  or  a  white  negro.     He  is  wander- 
ing in  a  hungry  search  for  a  certain  exhila- 
ration which  he  can  only  have  when  he  has 
the    courage    to    cease    from    wandering. 
Men  knew  better  than  this  in  old  times — 
in  the  time,  for  example,  of  Shakespeare's  )  i 
heroes.     When     Shakespeare's     men    are 
really  celibate  they  praise  the  undoubted  / 
advantages  of  celibacy,  liberty,  irresponsi-  ' 
bility,  a  chance  of  continual  change.     But 
they  were  not  such  fools  as  to  continue  to    ; 
talk  of  liberty  when  they  were  in  such  a   I 
condition  that  they  could  be  made  happy 
or  miserable  by  the  moving  of  some  one 

[33] 


A   Defence   of   Rash   Vows 

else's  eyebrow.     Suckling  classes  love  with 
debt  in  his  praise  of  freedom. 

"  And  he  that's  fairly  out  of  both 
Of  all  the  world  is  blest. 
He  lives  as  in  the  golden  age, 
When  all  things  made  were  common; 
He  takes  his  pipe,  he  takes  his  glass, 
He  fears  no  man  or  woman." 

This  is  a  perfectly  possible,  rational  and 
manly  position.  But  what  have  lovers  to 
do  with  ridiculous  affectations  of  fearing 
no  man  or  woman  ?  They  know  that  in 
the  turning  of  a  hand  the  whole  cosmic  en- 
gine to  the  remotest  star  may  become  an 
instrument  of  music  or  an  instrument  of 
torture.  They  hear  a  song  older  than 
Suckling's,  that  has  survived  a  hundred 
philosophies.  *'  Who  is  this  that  looketh 
out  of  the  window,  fair  as  the  sun,  clear 
as  the  moon,  terrible  as  an  army  with  ban- 
ners ? " 

As  we  have  said,  it  is  exactly  this  back- 
[34] 


A   Defence  of   Rash   Vows 

door,  this  sense  of  having  a  retreat  behind    />^ 
us,    that   is,    to  our  minds,   the  sterilizing- 
spirit    in    modern   pleasure.   I  Everywhere    .fr^/ 
there  is  the  persistent  and  insane  attempt 
to  obtain   pleasure  without  paying  for  it. 
Thus,  in  politics  the  modern  Jingoes  prac- 
tically say,  ''  Let  us  have  the  pleasures  of 
conquerors  without  the  pains  of  soldiers  : 
let  us  sit  on  sofas  and  be  a  hardy  race." 
Thus,  in  religion  and  morals,  the  decadent 
mystics  say  :   ^'  Let  us  have  the  fragrance  of 
sacred  purity  without  the  sorrows  of  self- 
restraint  ;  let  us  sing  hymns  alternately  to 
the  Virgin  and  Priapus."     Tjius  in  love  the 
free-lovers  say:  '*  Let  us  haV«  the  splen- 
dour of  oflfering  ourselves  without  the  peril   [^ 
of  committing  ourselves ;  let  us  see  whether 
one   cannot   commit   suicide  an   unlimited 
mimber  of  times." 

^  Emphatically  it  will  not  work.  There 
are  thrilling  moments,  doubtless,  for  the 
spectator,  the   amateur,  and  the  aesthete  ; 

[35] 


A   Defence   op   Rash   Vows 

but  there  is  one  thrill  that  is  known  only 
to  the  soldier  who  fights  for  his  own  flag, 
to  the  ascetic  who  starves  himself  for  his 
own  illumination,  to  the  lover  who  makes 
finally  his  own  choice.  And  it  is  this  trans- 
figuring self-discipline  that  makes  the  vow 
a  trul}'  sane  thing.  It  must  have  satisfied 
even  the  giant  hunger  of  the  soul  of  a  lover 
or  a  poet  to  know  that  in  consequence  of 
some  one  instant  of  decision  that  strange 
chain  would  hang  for  centuries  in  the  Alps 
among  the  silences  of  stars  and  snows.  All 
around  us  is  the  city  of  small  sins,  abound- 
ing in  backways  and  retreats,  but  surely, 
sooner  or  later,  the  towering  flame  will  rise 
from  the  harbour  announcing  that  the  reign 
of  the  cowards  is  over  and  a  man  is  burn- 
ing his  ships. 


[36] 


A   DEFENCE   OF    FARCE 

I  HAVE  never  been  able  to  understand 
why  certain  forms  of  art  should  be 
marked  off  as  something  debased  and 
trivial.  A  comedy  is  spoken  of  as  '*  de- 
generating into  farce " ;  it  would  be  fair 
criticism  to  speak  of  it  "changing  into 
farce";  but  as  for  degenerating  into  farce, 
we  might  equally  reasonably  speak  of  it 
as  degenerating  into  tragedy.  Again,  a 
story  is  spoken  of  as  "  melodramatic,"  and 
the  phrase,  queerly  enough,  is  not  meant  as 
a  compliment.  To  speak  of  something  as 
**  pantomimic "  or  ''sensational"  is  inno- 
cently supposed  to  be  biting,  heaven 
knows  why,  for  all  works  of  art  are  sensa- 
tions, and  a  good  pantomime  (now  extinct) 
one  of  the  pleasantest  sensations  of  all. 
'  This  stuff  is  fit  for  a  detective  story,"  is 


A   Defence   of   Farce 

often  said,  as  who  should  say,  ''  This  stuff 
is  fit  for  an  epic." 

Whatever  may  be  the  rights  and  wrongs 
of  this  mode  of  classification,  there  can  be 
no  doubt  about  one  most  practical  and- 
disastrous  effect  of  it.  These  lighter  or 
wilder  forms  of  art,  having  no  standard  set 
up  for  them,  no  gust  of  generous  artistic 
pride  to  lift  them  up,  do  actually  tend  to 
become  as  bad  as  they  are  supposed  to  be 
Neglected  children  of  the  great  mother, 
they  grow  up  in  darkness,  dirty  and  un- 
lettered,  and  when  they  are  right  they  are- 
right  almost  by  accident,  because  of  the 
blood  in  their  veins.  The  common  detect- 
ive story  of  mystery  and  murder  seems  to 
the  intelligent  reader  to  be  little  except  a 
strange  glimpse  of  a  planet  peopled  by  con- 
genital idiots,  who  cannot  find  the  end  of 
their  own  noses  or  the  character  of  their 
own  wives.  The  common  pantomime  seems 
like  some  horrible  satiric  picture  of  a  world 

[38] 


A   Defence  of   Farce 

without  cause  or  effect,  a  mass  of  **  jarring 
atoms,"  a  prolonged  mental  torture  of  irrele- 
vancy. The  ordinary  farce  seems  a  world 
of  almost  piteous  vulgarity,  where  a  half^ 
witted  and  stunted  creature  is  afraid  when 
his  wife  comes  home,  and  amused  when  she 
sits  down  on  the  door-step.  All  this  is,  in 
a  sense,  true,  but  it  is  the  fault  of  nothing 
in  heaven  or  earth  except  the  attitude  and 
the  phrases  quoted  at  the  beginning  of  this 
article.  We  have  no  doubt  in  the  world 
that,  if  the  other  forms  of  art  had  been 
equally  despised,  they  would  have  been 
equally  despicable.  If  people  had  spoken 
of  "sonnets"  with  the  same  accent  with 
which  they  speak  of  "  music-hall  songs,"  a 
sonnet  would  have  been  a  thing  so  fearful 
and  wonderful  that  we  almost  regret  we 
cannot  have  a  specimen ;  a  rowdy  sonnet  is 
a  thing  to  dream  about.  If  people  had  said 
that  epics  were  only  fit  for  children  and  nurse- 
maids,  "  Paradise  Lost"  might  have  been 

[39] 


A    Defence   of    Farce 

an  average  pantomime  :  it  might  have  been 
called  "  Harlequin  Satan,  or  How  Adam  'Ad 
'Em."  For  who  would  trouble  to  bring  to 
perfection  a  work  in  which  even  perfection 
is  grotesque  ?  Why  should  Shakespeare 
write  "Othello"  if  even  his  triumph  con- 
sisted in  the  eulogy,  "  Mr.  Shakespeare  is  fit 
for  something  better  than  writing  tragedies"? 
The  case  of  farce,  and  its  wilder  embodi- 
ment in  harlequinade,  is  especially  im- 
portant. That  these  high  and  legitimate 
forms  of  art,  glorified  by  Aristophanes  and 
Moli^re,  have  sunk  into  such  contempt 
may  be  due  to  many  causes  :  I  myself  have 
little  doubt  that  it  is  due  to  the  astonishing 
and  ludicrous  lack  of  belief  in  hope  and 
hilarity  which  marks  modern  aesthetics,  to 
such  an  extent  that  it  has  spread  even  to 
the  revolutionists  (once  the  hopeful  section 
of  men),  so  that  even  those  who  ask  us  to 
fling  the  stars  into  the  sea  are  not  quite 
sure  that  they  will  be  any  better  there  than 

[40] 


A    Defence   of   Farce 

they  were  before.  Every  form  of  literary 
art  must  be  a  symbol  of  some  phase  of  the 
human  spirit ;  but  whereas  the  phase  is,  in 
human  life,  sufficiently  convincing  in  itself, 
in  art  it  must  have  a  certain  pungency  and 
neatness  of  form,  to  compensate  for  its  lack 
of  reality.  Thus  any  set  of  young  people 
round  a  tea-table  may  have  all  the  comedy 
emotions  of  "  Much' Ado  about  Nothing" 
or  *'  Northanger  Abbey,"  but  if  their  actual 
conversation  were  reported,  it  would  pos- 
sibly not  be  a  worthy  addition  to  litera- 
ture. An  old  man  sitting  by  his  fire  may 
have  all  the  desolate  grandeur  of  Lear  or 
P^re  Goriot,  but  if  he  comes  into  literature 
he  must  do  something  besides  sit  by  the 
fire.  The  artistic  justification,  then,  of 
farce  and  pantomime  must  consist  in  the 
emotions  of  life  which  correspond  to  them. 
And  these  emotions  are  to  an  incredible 
extent  crushed  out  by  the  modern  insistence 
on  the  painful  side  of  life  only.     Pain,  it  is 

[41] 


A  Defence  of   Farce 

said,  is  the  dominant  element  of  life ;  but 
this  is  true  only  in  a  very  special  sense.  If 
pain  were  for  one  single  instant  literally 
the  dominant  element  in  life,  every  man 
would  be  found  hanging  dead  from  his  own 
bed-post  by  the  morning.  Pain,  as  the 
black  and  catastrophic  thing,  attracts  the 
youthful  artist,  just  as  the  schoolboy  draws 
devils  and  skeletons  and  men  hanging. 
But  joy  is  a  far  more  elusive  and  elvish 
matter,  since  it  is  our  reason  for  existing, 
and  a  very  feminine  reason ;  it  mingles 
with  every  breath  we  draw  and  every  cup 
of  tea  we  drink.  The  literature  of  joy  is 
infinitely  more  difficult,  more  rare  and  more 
triumphant  than  the  black  and  white  litera- 
ture of  pain.  And  of  all  the  varied  forms 
of  the  literature  of  joy,  the  form  most  truly 
worthy  of  moral  reverence  and  artistic  am- 
bition is  the  form  called  *' farce" — or  its 
wilder  shape  in  pantomime. 

To  the  quietest  human  being,  seated  in 

[42] 


A    Defence   of   Farce 

the  quietest  house,  there  will  sometimes 
come  a  sudden  and  unmeaning  hunger  for 
the  possibilities  or  impossibilities  of  things; 
he  will  abruptly  wonder  whether  the  tea- 
pot may  not  suddenly  begin  to  pour  out 
honey  or  sea-water,  the  clock  to  point  to 
all  hours  of  the  day  at  once,  the  candle  to 
burn  green  or  crimson,  the  door  to  open 
upon  a  lake  or  a  potato-field  instead  of  a 
London  street.  Upon  any  one  who  feels 
this  nameless  anarchism  there  rests  for  the 
time  being  the  abiding  spirit  of  pantomime. 
Of  the  clown  who  cuts  the  policeman  in 
two  it  may  be  said  (with  no  darker  mean- 
ing) that  he  realizes  one  of  our  visions. 
And  it  may  be  noted  here  that  this  internal 
quality  in  pantomime  is  perfectly  symbolized 
and  preserved  by  that  commonplace  or 
cockney  landscape  and  architecture  which 
characterizes  pantomime  and  farce.  If  the 
whole  affair  happened  in  some  alien  atmos- 
phere, if  a  pear-tree  began  to  grow  apples 

[43] 


A   Defence   of   Farce 

or  a  river  to  run  with  wine  in  some  strange 
fairy-land,  the  effect  would  be  quite  different. 
The  streets  and  shops  and  door-knockers 
of  the  harlequinade,  which  to  the  vulgar  aes- 
thete make  it  seem  commonplace,  are  in  truth 
the  very  essence  of  the  aesthetic  departure. 
It  must  be  an  actual  modern  door  which 
opens  and  shuts,  constantly  disclosing  dif- 
ferent interiors ;  it  must  be  a  real  baker 
whose  loaves  fly  up  into  air  without  his 
touching  them,  or  else  the  whole  internal 
excitement  of  this  elvish  invasion  of  civili- 
zation, this  abrupt  entrance  of  Puck  into 
Pimlico,  is  lost.  Some  day,  perhaps,  when 
the  present  narrow  phase  of  aesthetics  has 
ceased  to  monopolize  the  name,  the  glory 
of  a  farcical  art  may  become  fashionable. 
Long  after  men  have  ceased  to  drape  their 
houses  in  green  and  gray  and  to  adorn 
them  with  Japanese  vases,  an  aesthete  may 
build  a  house  on  pantomime  principles,  in 
which  all  the  doors  shall  have  their  bells 
[44] 


A    Defence   of    Farce 

and  knockers  on  the  inside,  all  the  stair- 
cases be  constructed  to  vanish  on  the 
pressing  of  a  button,  and  all  the  dinners 
(humorous  dinners  in  themselves)  come 
up  cooked  through  a  trap-door.  We  are 
very  sure,  at  least,  that  it  is  as  reasonable 
to  regulate  one's  life  and  lodgings  by  this 
kind  of  art  as  by  any  other. 

The  whole  of  this  view  of  farce  and 
pantomime  may  seem  insane  to  us ;  but  we 
fear  that  it  is  we  who  are  insane.  Nothing 
in  this  strange  age  of  transition  is  so  de- 
pressing as  its  merriment.  All  the  most 
brilliant  men  of  the  day  when  they  set 
about  the  writing  of  comic  literature  do  it 
under  one  destructive  fallacy  and  disad- 
vantage :  the  notion  that  comic  literature 
is  in  some  sort  of  way  superficial.  They 
give  us  little  knickknacks  of  the  brittleness 
of  which  they  positively  boast,  although 
two  thousand  years  have  beaten  as  vainly 
upon    the   follies   of  the  "  Frogs  "  as   on 

[45] 


A   Defence  of   Farce 

the  wisdom  of  the  '*  Republic."  It  is  all  a 
mean  shame  of  joy.  When  we  come  out 
from  a  performance  of  the  *'  Midsummer 
Night's  Dream "  we  feel  as  near  to  the 
stars  as  when  we  come  out  from  "  King 
Lear."  For  the  joy  of  these  works  is  older 
than  sorrow,  their  extravagance  is  saner  than 
wisdom,  their  love  is  stronger  than  death. 

The  old  masters  of  a  healthy  madness, 
Aristophanes  or  Rabelais  or  Shakespeare, 
doubtless  had  many  brushes  with  the  pre- 
cisians or  ascetics  of  their  day,  but  we 
cannot  but  feel  that  for  honest  severity 
and  consistent  self-maceration  they  would 
always  have  had  respect.  But  what  abysses 
of  scorn,  inconceivable  to  any  modern, 
would  they  have  reserved  for  an  aesthetic 
type  and  movement  which  violated  morality 
and  did  not  even  find  pleasure,  which  out- 
raged sanity  and  could  not  attain  to  exuber- 
ance, which  contented  itself  with  the  fool's 
cap  without  the  bells  1 

[46] 


A   DEFENCE  OF    BABY-WORSHIP 

THE  two  facts  which  attract  almost 
every  normal  person  to  children  are, 
first,  that  they  are  very  serious,  and, 
secondly,  that  they  are  in  consequence 
very  happy.  They  are  jolly  with  the  com- 
pleteness which  is  possible  only  in  the  ab- 
sence of  humour.  The  most  unfathomable 
schools  and  sages  have  never  attained  to 
the  gravity  which  dwells  in  the  eyes  of  a 
baby  of  three  months  old.  It  is  the  gravity 
of  astonishment  at  the  universe,  and  as- 
tonishment at  the  universe  is  not  mysticism, 
but  a  transcendent  common  sense.  The 
fascination  of  children  lies  in  this  :  that  with 
each  of  them  all  things  are  remade,  and  the 
universe  is  put  again  upon  its  trial.  As  we 
walk  the  streets  and  see  below  us  those  de- 
''g^*''i  '    \)Uii>oi  ^;  heads,  three  times  too  big 


A    Defence  of   Baby-Worship 

for  the  body,  which  mark  these  human 
mushrooms,  we  ought  always  primarily  to 
remember  that  within  every  one  of  these 
heads  there  is  a  new  universe,  as  new  as 
it  was  on  the  seventh  day  of  creation.  In 
each  of  those  orbs  there  is  a  new  sys- 
tem of  stars,  new  grass,  new  cities,  a  new 
sea. 

There  is  always  in  the  healthy  mind  an 
obscure  prompting  that  religion  teaches  us 
rather  to  dig  than  to  climb  ;  that  if  we  could 
once  understand  the  common  clay  of  earth 
we  should  understand  everything.  Simi- 
larly, we  have  the  sentiment  that  if  we  could 
destroy  custom  at  a  blow  and  see  the  stars 
as  a  child  sees  them,  we  should  need  no 
other  apocalypse.  This  is  the  great  truth 
which  has  always  lain  at  the  back  of  baby- 
worship,  and  which  will  support  it  to  the 
end.  Maturity,  with  its  endless  energies 
and  aspirations,  may  easily  be  convinced 
that  it  will   find  new  things  to  appreciate ; 

[48] 


A    Defence   of   Baby-Worship 

but  it  will  never  be  convinced,  at  bottom, 
that  it  has  properly  appreciated  v/hat  it  has 
got.  We  may  scale  the  heavens  and  find 
new  stars  innumerable,  but  there  is  still  the 
new  star  we  have  not  found — that  on  which 
we  were  born. 

But  the  influence  of  children  goes  further 
than  its  first  trifling  eff'ort  of  remaking 
heaven  and  earth.  It  forces  us  actually  to 
remodel  our  conduct  in  accordance  with 
this  revolutionary  theory  of  the  marvellous- 
ness  of  all  things.  We  do  (even  when  we 
are  perfectly  simple  or  ignorant) — we  do 
actually  treat  talking  in  children  as  marvel- 
lous, walking  in  children  as  marvellous, 
common  intelligence  in  children  as  marvel- 
lous. The  cynical  philosopher  fancies  he 
has  a  victory  in  this  matter — that  he  can 
laugh  when  he  shows  that  the  words  or  an- 
tics of  the  child,  so  much  admired  by  its  wor- 
shippers, are  common  enough.  The  fact  is  ■ 
ihai  rhis  is  precisely  whcie  l.. :•/-/._.  :'  'p  is 

[49] 


A   Defence   of   Baby-Worship 

so  profoundly  right.  Any  words  and  any 
antics  in  a  lump  of  clay  are  wonderful, 
the  child's  words  and  antics  are  wonder- 
ful, and  it  is  only  fair  to  say  that  the 
philosopher's  words  and  antics  are  equally 
wonderful. 

The  truth  is  that  it  is  our  attitude  towards 
children  that  is  right,  and  our  attitude 
towards  grown-up  people  that  is  wrong. 
Our  attitude  towards  our  equals  in  age  con- 
sists in  a  servile  solemnity,  overlying  a  con- 
siderable degree  of  indifference  or  disdain. 
Our  attitude  towards  children  consists  in  a 
condescending  indulgence,  overlying  an  un- 
fathomable respect.  We  bow  to  grown 
people,  take  off  our  hats  to  them,  refrain 
from  contradicting  them  flatly,  but  we  do 
not  appreciate  them  properly.  We  make 
puppets  of  children,  lecture  them,  pull  their 
hair,  and  reverence,  love,  and  fear  them. 
When  we  reverence  anything  in  the  mature, 
it  is  their  virtues  or  their  wisdom,  and  this 


A   De,  •     , :    OF    Baby-Worship 

is  an  ea^y  iu..LLer.     But  we  reverence  the 
faults  and  follies  of  children. 

We  should  probably  come  considerably 
nearer  to  the  true  conception  of  things  if 
we  treated  all  grown-up  persons,  of  all  titles 
and  types,  with  precisely  that  dark  affection 
and  dazed  respect  with  which  we  treat  the 
infantile  limitations.  A  child  has  a  diffi- 
culty in  achieving  the  miracle  of  speech, 
consequently  we  find  his  blunders  almost  as 
marvellous  as  his  accuracy.  If  we  only 
adopted  the  same  attitude  towards  Premiers 
and  Chancellors  of  the  Exchequer,  if  we 
genially  encouraged  their  stammering  and 
delightful  attempts  at  human  speech,  we 
should  be  in  a  far  more  wise  and  tolerant 
temper.  A  child  has  a  knack  of  making 
experiments  in  life,  generally  healthy  in  mo- 
tive, but  often  intolerable  in  a  domestic 
commonwealth.  If  we  only  treated  all 
commercial  buccaneers  and  bumptious  ty- 
rants on  the  same  terms,  if  we  gently 
[51] 


A   Defence   of   Bab>  '.ship 

chided  their  brutalities  as  rather  quaint  mis- 
takes in  the  conduct  of  life,  if  we  simply 
told  them  that  they  would  "  understand 
when  they  were  older,"  we  should  probably 
be  adopting  the  best  and  most  crushing 
attitude  towards  the  weaknesses  of  hu- 
manity. In  our  relations  to  children  we 
prove  that  the  paradox  is  entirely  true,  that 
it  is  possible  to  combine  an  amnesty  that 
verges  on  contempt  with  a  worship  that 
verges  upon  terror.  We  forgive  children 
with  the  same  kind  of  blasphemous  gentle- 
ness with  which  Omar  Khayyam  forgave  the 
Omnipotent. 

The  essential  rectitude  of  our  view  of 
children  lies  in  the  fact  that  we  feel  them 
and  their  ways  to  be  supernatural  while,  for 
some  mysterious  reason,  we  do  not  feel  our- 
selves or  our  own  ways  to  be  supernatural. 
The  very  smallness  of  children  makes  it 
possible  to  regard  them  as  marvels  ;  we 
seem  to  be  dealing  with  a  new  race,  cpIv  to 

[  52  ] 


A    Defence   of    Baby-Worship 

be  seen  through  a  microscope.  I  doubt  if 
any  one  of  any  tenderness  or  imagination 
can  see  the  hand  of  a  child  and  not  be  a  little 
frightened  of  it.  It  is  awful  to  think  of  the 
essential  human  energy  moving  so  tiny  a 
thing  ;  it  is  like  imagining  that  human  na- 
ture could  live  in  the  wing  of  a  butterfly  or 
the  leaf  of  a  tree.  When  we  look  upon 
lives  so  human  and  yet  so  small,  we  feel  as 
if  we  ourselves  were  enlarged  to  an  embar- 
rassing bigness  of  stature.  We  feel  the  same 
kind  of  obligation  to  these  creatures  that  a 
deity  might  feel  if  he  had  created  something 
that  he  could  not  und>     tnad. 

But  the  humorous  look  of  children  is 
perhaps  the  most  endearing  of  all  the  bonds 
that  hold  the  Cosmos  tog^ether.  Their  top- 
heavy  dignity  is  mere  touching  than  anv 
humility ;  their  solemnity  gives  us  more 
hope  for  all  things  than  a  thousand  carnivals 
of  optimism  ;  their  large  and  lustrous  eyes 
all  the  stars  in  their  astonish- 
[53] 


A   Defence  of   Baby-Worship 

ment ;  their  fascinating  absence  of  nose 
seems  to  give  to  us  the  most  perfect  hint  of 
the  humour  that  awaits  us  in  the  kingdom  of 
heaven. 


[S4] 


A  DEFENCE  OF  SLANG 

THE  aristocrats  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury have  destroyed  entirely  their 
one  solitary  utility.  It  is  their  business  to 
be  flaunting  and  arrogant  ;  but  they  flaunt 
unobtrusively,  and  their  attempts  at  arro- 
gance are  depressing.  Their  chief  duty 
hitherto  has  been  the  development  of 
variety,  vivacity,  and  fullness  of  life ;  oli- 
garchy was  the  world's  first  experiment  in 
liberty.  But  now  they  have  adopted  the 
opposite  ideal  of  "  good  form,"  which  may 
be  defined  as  Puritanism  without  religion. 
Good  form  has  sent  them  all  into  black 
like  the  stroke  of  a  funeral  bell.  They  en- 
gage, like  Mr.  Gilbert's  curates,  in  a  war 
of  mildness,  a  positive  competition  of  ob- 
scurity. In  old  times  the  lords  of  the 
earth  sought  above  all  things   to   be   dis- 


A   Defence   of   Slang 

tinguished  from  each  other ;  with  that  ob- 
ject they  erected  outrageous  images  on 
their  helmets  and  painted  preposterous 
colours  on  their  shields.  They  wished  to 
make  it  entirely  clear  that  a  Norfolk  was 
as  different,  say,  from  an  Argyll  as  a  white 
lion  from  a  black  pig.  But  to-day  their 
ideal  is  precisely  the  opposite  one,  and  if 
a  Norfolk  and  an  Argyll  were  dressed  so 
much  alike  that  they  were  mistaken  for 
each  other  they  would  both  go  home  danc- 
ing with  joy. 

The  consequences  of  this  are  inevitable. 
The  aristocracy  must  lose  their  function 
of  standing  to  the  world  for  the  idea  of 
variety,  experiment,  and  colour,  and  we 
must  find  these  things  in  some  other  class. 
To  ask  whether  we  shall  find  them  in  the 
middle  class  would  be  to  jest  upon  sacred 
matters.  The  only  conclusion,  therefore, 
is  that  it  is  to  certain  sections  of  the  lower 
class,  chiefly,  for  example,  to  omnibus-co: 

[56] 


A   Defence   of  Slang 

ductors,  with  their  rich  and  rococo  mode  of 
thought,  that  we  must  look  for  guidance 
towards  liberty  and  light. 

The  one  stream  of  poetry  which  is  con- 
tinually flowing  is  slang.  Every  day  a 
nameless  poet  weaves  some  fairy  tracery  of 
popular  language.  It  may  be  said  that  the 
fashionable  world  talks  slang  as  much  as 
the  democratic  ;  this  is  true,  and  it  strongly 
supports  the  view  under  consideration. 
Nothing  is  more  startling  than  the  contrast 
between  the  heavy,  formal,  lifeless  slang  of 
the  man-about-town  and  the  light,  living, 
and  flexible  slang  of  the  coster.  The  talk 
of  the  upper  strata  of  the  educated  classes 
is  about  the  most  shapeless,  aimless,  and 
hopeless  literary  product  that  the  world  has 
ever  seen.  Clearly  in  this,  again,  the  up- 
per classes  have  degenerated.  We  have 
ample  evidence  that  the  old  leaders  of 
feudal  war  could  speak  on  occasion  v.  .li;  a 
certain  natural  symbolism  and  eloquence 
I  57] 


A   Defence  of  Slang 

that  they  had  not  gained  from  books. 
When  Cyrano  de  Bergerac,  in  Rostand's 
play,  throws  doubts  on  the  reality  of  Chris- 
tian's dullness  and  lack  of  culture,  the  lat- 
ter replies : 


"  Bah  !  on  trouve  des  mots  quand  on  monte  k 
I'assaut ; 
Oui,  j'ai  un  certain  esprit  facile  et  militaire  ;  " 


and  these  two  lines  sum  up  a  truth  about 
the  old  oligarchs.  They  could  not  write 
three  legible  letters,  but  they  could  some- 
times speak  literature.  Douglas,  when  he 
hurled  the  heart  of  Bruce  in  front  of  him 
in  his  last  battle,  cried  out,  "  Pass  first, 
great  heart,  as  thou  wert  ever  wont."  A 
Spanish  nobleman,  when  commanded  by 
the  King  to  receive  a  high-placed  and  no- 
torious traitor,  said  :  *'  I  will  receive  him 
11  obedience,  and  burn  down  my  house 
;ilierwards."  This  is  literature  without 
[58] 


A      L  EFENCE    OF     SlANG 

culture  ;  it  is  the  speech  of  men  convinced 
that  they  have  to  assert  proudly  the  poetry 
of  life. 

Any  one,  however,  who  should  seek  for 
such  pearls  in  the  conversation  of  a  young 
man  of  modern  Belgravia  would  have  much 
sorrow  in  his  life.     It  is  not  only  impossible! 
for  aristocrats  to  assert  proudly  the  poetry/ 
of  life  ;  it  is  more  impossible  for  them  than 
for  any  one  else.     It  is  positively  consid- 
ered vulgar  for  a  nobleman  to  boast  of  his 
ancient  name,  which  is,  when  one  comes 
to  think  of  it,  the  only  rational  object  of 
his  existence.     If  a  man  in  the  street  pro- 
claimed, with  rude  feudal  rhetoric,  that  he 
was  the  Earl   of  Doncaster,  he  would  be. 
arrested  as  a  lunatic  ;  but  if  it  were  discov-i' 
ered  that  he  really  was  the  Earl  of  Don-j 
caster,  he  would   simply  be  cut  as  a  cad.' 
No  poetical  prose  must  be  expected  from 
Earls  as  a  class.     The  fashionable  slang  is 
hardly  even  a  language  ;  it  is  like  the  form- 

[59] 


A   Defence  of   Si./^wCi 

less  cries  of  animals,  dimly  indicating  cer- 
tain broad,  well-understood  states  of  mind. 
"  Bored,"  "  cut  up,"  "  jolly,"  "  rotten," 
and  so  on,  are  like  the  words  of  some  tribe 
of  savages  whose  vocabulary  has  only 
twenty  of  them.  If  a  man  of  fashion 
wished  to  protest  against  some  solecism  in 
another  man  of  fashion,  his  utterance  would 
be  a  mere  string  of  set  phrases,  as  lifeless 
as  a  string  of  dead  fish.  But  an  omnibus- 
conductor  (being  filled  with  the  Muse) 
would  burst  out  into  a  solid  literary  effort : 
**  You're  a  gentleman,  aren't  yer  .  .  .  yer 
boots  is  a  lot  brighter  than  yer  'ed  .  .  . 
there's  precious  little  of  yer,  and  that's 
clothes  .  .  .  that's  right,  put  yer  cigar  in 
yer  mouth 'cos  I  can't  see  yer  be'ind  it  .  .  . 
take  it  out  again,  do  yer!  you're  young  for 
smokin',  but  I've  sent  for  yer  mother.  .  .  . 
Goin'  ?  oh,  don't  run  away  :  I  won't  'arm 
yer.  I've  got  a  good  'art,  I  'ave.  .  .  . 
*  Down  with  croolty  to  animals,'  I  say," 
[60] 


A   Defence  of  Slang 

and  so  on.  It  is  evident  that  this  mode  of 
speech  is  not  only  literary,  but  literary  in 
a  very  ornate  and  almost  artificial  sense. 
Keats  never  put  into  a  sonnet  so  many  re- 
mote metaphors  as  a  coster  puts  into  a 
curse  ;  his  speech  is  one  long  allegory,  like 
Spenser's  *'  Faerie  Queen." 

I  do  not  imagine  that  it  is  necessary  to 
demonstrate  that  this  poetic  allusiveness  is 
the  characteristic  of  true  slang.  Such  an 
expression  as  '*  Keep  your  hair  on  "  is  posi- 
tively Meredithian  in  its  perverse  and  mys- 
terious manner  of  expressing  an  idea.  The 
Americans  have  a  well-known  expression 
about  "  swelled-head  "  as  a  description  of 
self-approval,  and  the  other  day  I  heard  a 
remarkable  fantasia  upon  this  air.  An 
American  said  that  after  the  Chinese  War 
the  Japanese  wanted  '*  to  put  on  their  hats 
with  a  shoe-horn."  This  is  a  monument  of 
the  true  nature  of  slang,  which  consists  in 
getting  further  and   further  away  from  the 


A     DeFENC-  .  ANO 

-riginal  concept  more  and 

more  ss  an  assu/upiiaii.     li  i^  rather  like 
the  iit-^' -^'•'  .'r^rtrin-  ^^f  tne  Symbolists. 

ine  real  reason  of  this  great  develop- 
ment of  eloquence  among  the  lower  orders 
again  brings  us  back  to  the  case  of  the 
aristocracy  in  earlier  times.  The  lower 
classes  live  in  a  state  of  war,  a  war  of 
words.  Their  readiness  is  the  product  of 
the  same  fiery  individualism  as  the  readi- 
ness of  the  old  fighting  oligarchs.  Any 
cabman  has  to  be  ready  with  his  tongue, 
as  any  gentleman  of  the  last  century  had  to 
be  ready  with  his  sword.  It  is  unfortunate 
that  the  poetry  which  is  developed  by  this 
process  should  be  purely  a  grotesque 
poetry.  But  as  the  higher  orders  of  so- 
ciety have  entirely  abdicated  their  right  to 
speak  with  a  heroic  eloquence,  it  is  no 
wonder  that  the  language  should  develop 
by  itself  in  the  direction  of  a  rowdy  elo- 
quence.    The  essential  point  is  that  <(^ne- 

[62] 


A   Defence  of  Slang 

body  must  be  at  work  adding  new  symbols 
and  new  circumlocutions  to  a  language.         •*- 

All  slang  is  metaphor,  and  all  metaphor 
is  poetry.  If  we  paused  for  a  moment  to 
examine  the  cheapest  cant  phrases  that 
pass  our  lips  every  day,  we  should  find  that 
they  were  as  rich  and  suggestive  as  so 
many  sonnets.  To  take  a  single  instance  : 
we  speak  of  a  man  in  English  social  rela- 
tions **  breaking  the  ice."  If  this  were  ex- 
panded into  a  sonnet,  we  should  have  be- 
fore us  a  dark  and  sublime  picture  of  an 
ocean  of  everlasting  ice,  the  sombre  and 
baffling  mirror  of  the  Northern  nature,  over 
which  men  walked  and  danced  and  skated 
easily,  but  under  which  the  living  waters 
roared  and  toiled  fathoms  below.  The' 
world  of  slang  is  a  kind  of  topsy-turveydom 
of  poetry,  full  of  blue  moons  and  white  ele- 
phants, of  men  losing  their  heads,  and  men 
whose  tongues  run  away  with  them — a 
whole  chaos  of  fairy-tales. 

[63] 


A  DEFENCE  OF   HUMILITY 

TRE  act  of  defending  any  of  the  cardi- 
nal virtues  has  to-day  all  the  exhilara- 
tion of  a  vice.  Moral  truisms  have  been 
so  much  disputed  that  they  have  begun  to 
sparkle  like  so  many  brilliant  paradoxes. 
And  especially  (in  this  age  of  egoistic 
idealism)  there  is  about  one  who  defends 
humility  something  inexpressibly  rakish. 
ij  It  is  no  part  of  my  intention  to  defend 
liumility  on  practical  grounds.  Practical 
grounds  are  uninteresting,  and,  moreover, 
on  practical  grounds  the  case  for  humility 
is  overwhelming.  We  all  know  that  the 
**  divine  glory  of  the  ego  "  is  socially  a 
great  nuisance;  we  all  do  actually  value 
our  friends  for  modesty,  freshness,  and 
simplicity  of  heart.     Whatever  may  be  the 


A   Defence  of   Humility 

reason,  we  all  do  warmly  respect  humility 
— in  other  people. 

But  the  matter  must  go  deeper  than  this. 
If  the  grounds  of  humility  are  found  only 
in  social  convenience,  they  may  be  quite 
trivial  and  temporary.  The  egoists  may 
be  the  martyrs  of  a  nobler  dispensation, 
agonizing  for  a  more  arduous  ideal.  To 
judge  from  the  comparative  lack  of  ease  in 
their  social  manner,  this  seems  a  reasonable 
suggestion. 

There  is  one  thing  that  must  be  seen  at 
the  outset  of  the  study  of  humility  from 
an  intrinsic  and  eternal  point  of  view. 
The  new  philosophy  of  self-esteem  and 
self-assertion  declares  that  humility  is  a 
vice.  If  it  be  so,  it  is  quite  clear  that  it 
is  one  of  those  vices  which  are  an  integral 
part  of  original  sin.  It  follows  with  the 
precision  of  clockwork  every  one  of  the 
great  joys  of  life.  No  one,  for  example, 
was  ever  in  love  without  indulging  in  a 
[6s] 


A   Defe!nce  of   Humility 

positive  debauch  of  humility.  All  full- 
blooded  and  natural  people,  such  as  school- 
boys, enjoy  humility  the  moment  they  at- 
tain hero-worship.  Humility,  again,  is  said 
both  by  its  upholders  and  opponents  to  be 
the  peculiar  growth  of  Christianity.  The 
real  and  obvious  reason  of  this  is  often 
missed.  The  pagans  insisted  upon  self- 
assertion  because  it  was  the  essence  of 
their  creed  that  the  gods,  though  strong 
and  just,  were  mystic,  capricious,  and  even 
indifferent.  But  the  essence  of  Christianity 
was  in  a  literal  sense  the  New  Testament 
— a  covenant  with  God  which  opened  to 
men  a  clear  deliverance.  They  thought 
themselves  secure ;  they  claimed  palaces 
of  pearl  and  silver  under  the  oath  and'  seal 
of  the  Omnipotent;  they  believed  them- 
selves rich  with  an  irrevocable  benediction 
which  set  them  above  the  stars ;  and  im- 
mediately they  discovered  humility.  It 
was  only  another  example  of  the  same 
[66] 


A    Defence   of   Humility 

immutable  paradox.     It  is  always  the  se- 
cure who  are  humble. 

This  particular  instance  survives  in  the 
evangelical  revivalists  of  the  street.  They 
are  irritating  enough,  but  no  one  who  has 
really  studied  them  can  deny  that  the  irrita- 
tion is  occasioned  by  these  two  things,  an 
irritating  hilarity  and  an  irritating  humility. 
This  combination  of  joy  and  self-prostration 
is  a  great  deal  too  universal  to  be  ignored. 
If  humility  has  been  discredited  as  a  virtue 
at  the  present  day,  it  is  not  wholly  irrelevant 
to  remark  that  this  discredit  has  arisen  at 
the  same  time  as  a  great  collapse  of  joy  in 
current  literature  and  philosophy.  Men 
have  revived  the  splendour  of  Greek  self- 
assertion  at  the  same  time  that  they  have 
revived  the  bitterness  of  Greek  pessimism. 
A  literature  has  arisen  which  commands  us 
all  to  arrogate  to  ourselves  the  liberty  of 
self-sufficing  deities  at  the  same  time  that  it 
exhibits  us  to  ourselves  as  dingy  maniacs 

[67] 


A   Defence  of   Humility 

who  ought  to  be  chained  up  like  dogs.  It 
is  certainly  a  curious  state  of  things  alto- 
gether. When  we  are  genuinely  happy, 
we  think  we  are  unworthy  of  happiness. 
But  when  we  are  demanding  a  divine 
emancipation  we  seem  to  be  perfectly 
certain  that  we  are  unworthy  of  anything. 

The  only  explanation  of  the  matter  must 
be  found  in  the  conviction  that  humility 
has  infinitely  deeper  roots  than  any  modern 
men  suppose;  that  it  is  a  metaphysical 
and,  one  might  almost  say,  a  mathematical 
virtue.  Probably  this  can  best  be  tested 
by  a  study  of  those  who  frankly  disregard 
humility  and  assert  the  supreme  duty  of 
perfecting  and  expressing  one's  self.  These 
people  tend,  by  a  perfectly  natural  process, 
to  bring  their  own  great  human  gifts  of 
culture,  intellect,  or  moral  power  to  a 
great  perfection,  successively  shutting  out 
everything  that  they  feel  to  be  lower  than 
themselves.  Now  shutting  out  things  is  all 
[68] 


A   Defence  of   Humility 

very  well,  but  it  has  one  simple  corollary — 
that  from  everything  that  we  shut  out  we 
are  ourselves  shut  out.  When  we  shut  our 
door  on  the  wind,  it  would  be  equally  true 
to  say  that  the  wind  shuts  its  door  on  us. 
Whatever  virtues  a  triumphant  egoism  really 
leads  to,  no  one  can  reasonably  pretend 
that  it  leads  to  knowledge.  Turning  a 
beggar  from  the  door  may  be  right  enough, 
but  pretending  to  know  all  the  stories  the 
beggar  might  have  narrated  is  pure  non- 
sense ;  and  this  is  practically  the  claim  of 
the  egoism  which  thinks  that  self-assertion 
can  obtain  knowledge.  A  beetle  may  or 
may  not  be  inferior  to  a  man — the  matter 
awaits  demonstration  ;  but  if  he  were  in- 
ferior by  ten  thousand  fathoms,  the  fact 
remains  that  there  is  probably  a  beetle  view 
of  things  of  which  a  man  is  entirely  igno- 
rant. If  he  wishes  to  conceive  that  point 
of  view,  he  will  scarcely  reach  it  by  per- 
sistently revelling  in  the  fact  that  he  is  not 

[69] 


A   Defence   of    Humility 

a  beetle.  The  most  brilliant  exponent  of 
the  egoistic  school,  Nietszche,  with  deadly 
and  honourable  logic,  admitted  that  the 
philosophy  of  self-satisfaction  led  to  look- 
ing down  upon  the  weak,  the  cowardly,  and 
the  ignorant.  Looking  down  on  things 
may  be  a  delightful  experience,  only  there 
is  nothing,  from  a  mountain  to  a  cabbage, 
that  is  really  seen  when  it  is  seen  from  a 
balloon.  The  philosopher  of  the  ego  sees 
everything,  no  doubt,  from  a  high  and  rari- 
fied  heaven  ;  only  he  sees  everything  fore- 
shortened or  deformed. 

Now  if  we  imagine  that  a  man  wished 
truly,  as  far  as  possible,  to  see  everything 
as  it  was,  he  would  certainly  proceed  on 
a  different  principle.  He  would  seek  to 
divest  .himself  for  a  time  of  those  personal 
peculiarities  which  tend  to  divide  him  from 
the  thing  he  studies.  It  is  as  difficult,  for 
example,  for  a  man  to  examine  a  fish  with- 
out developing  a  certain  vanity  in  possess- 

[70] 


A   Defence   of   Humility 

ing  a  pair  of  legs,  as  if  they  were  the  latest 
article  of  personal  adornment.  But  if  a 
fish  is  to  be  approximately  understood,  this 
physiological  dandyism  must  be  overcome. 
The  earnest  student  of  fish  morality  will, 
spiritually  speaking,  chop  off  his  legs.  And 
similarly  the  student  of  birds  will  eliminate 
his  arms ;  the  frog-lover  will  with  one  stroke 
of  the  imagination  remove  all  his  teeth,  and 
the  spirit  wishing  to  enter  into  all  the  hopes 
and  fears  of  jelly-fish  will  simplify  his  per- 
sonal appearance  to  a  really  alarming  extent. 
It  would  appear,  therefore,  that  this  great 
body  of  ours  and  all  its  natural  instincts, 
of  which  we  are  proud,  and  justly  proud, 
is  rather  an  encumbrance  at  the  moment 
when  we  attempt  to  appreciate  things  as 
they  should  be  appreciated.  We  do  actually 
go  through  a  process  of  mental  asceticism, 
a  castration  of  the  entire  being,  when  we 
wish  to  feel  the  abounding  good  in  all  things. 
It  is  good  for  us  at  certain  times  that  our- 
[71] 


A   Defence  of   Humility 

selves  should  be  like  a  mere  window — as 
clear,  as  luminous,  and  as  invisible. 

In  a  very  entertaining  work,  over  which 
we  have  roared  in  childhood,  it  is  stated 
that  a  point  has  no  parts  and  no  magnitude. 
Humility  is  the  luxurious  art  of  reducing 
ourselves  to  a  point,  not  to  a  small  thing  or 
a  large  one,  but  to  a  thing  with  no  size  at 
all,  so  that  to  it  all  the  cosmic  things  are 
what  they  really  are — of  immeasurable  stat- 
ure. That  the  trees  are  high  and  the  grasses 
short  is  a  mere  accident  of  our  own  foot- 
rules  and  our  own  stature.  But  to  the  spirit 
which  has  stripped  off  for  a  moment  its  own 
idle  temporal  standards  the  grass  is  an  ever- 
lasting forest,  with  dragons  for  denizens; 
the  stones  of  the  road  are  as  incredible 
mountains  piled  one  upon  the  other;  the 
dandelions  are  like  gigantic  bonfires  illu- 
minating the  lands  around ;  and  the  heath- 
bells  on  their  stalks  are  like  planets  hung 
in  heaven  each  higher  than  the  other.  Be- 
[7^] 


A   Defence   of   Humility 

tween  one  stake  of  a  paling  and  another 
there  are  new  and  terrible  landscapes  ; 
here  a  desert,  with  nothing  but  one  mis- 
shapen rock;  here  a  miraculous  forest,  of 
which  all  the  trees  flower  above  the  head 
with  the  hues  of  sunset ;  here,  again,  a  sea 
full  of  monsters  that  Dante  would  not  have 
dared  to  dream.  These  are  the  visions  of 
him  who,  like  the  child  in  the  fairy-tales,  is 
not  afraid  to  become  small.  Meanwhile,  the 
sage  whose  faith  is  in  magnitude  and  ambition 
is,  like  a  giant,  becoming  larger  and  larger, 
which  only  means  that  the  stars  are  becom- 
ing smaller  and  smaller.  World  after  world 
falls  from  him  into  insignificance ;  the  whole 
passionate  and  intricate  life  of  common 
things  becomes  as  lost  to  him  as  is  the  life 
of  the  infusoria  to  a  man  without  a  micro- 
scope. He  rises  always  through  desolate 
eternities.  He  may  find  new  systems,  and 
forget  them ;  he  may  discover  fresh  uni- 
verses, and  learn  to  despise  them.  But  the 
[73] 


A   Defence   of   Humility 

towering  and  tropical  vision  of  things  as 
they  really  are — the  gigantic  daisies,  the 
heaven-consuming  dandelions,  the  great 
Odyssey  of  strange-coloured  oceans  and 
strange-shaped  trees,  of  dust  like  the 
wreck  of  temples,  and  thistledown  like 
the  ruin  of  stars — all  this  colossal  vision 
shall  perish  with  the  last  of  the  humble. 


[74] 


A  DEFENCE  OF  PENNY 
DREADFULS 

ONE  of  the  strangest  examples  of  the 
degree  to  which  ordinary  life  is  un- 
dervalued is  the  example  of  popular  litera- 
ture, the  vast  mass  of  which  we  contentedly 
describe  as  vulgar.  The  boy's  novelette 
may  be  ignorant  in  a  literary  sense,  which 
is  only  like  saying  that  a  modern  novel  is 
ignorant  in  the  chemical  sense,  or  the  eco- 
nomic sense,  or  the  astronomical  sense  ;  but 
it  is  not  vulgar  intrinsically — it  is  the  actual 
centre  of  a  million  flaming  imaginations. 

In  former  centuries  the  educated  class 
ignored  the  ruck  of  vulgar  literature.  They 
ignored,  and  therefore  did  not,  properly 
speaking,  despise  it.  Simple  ignorance  and 
indifference  does  not  inflate  the  character 
with  pride.     A  man  does  not  walk  down 


A    Defence   of    Penny    Dreadfuls 

the  street  giving  a  haughty  twirl  to  his 
moustaches  at  the  thought  of  his  superiority 
to  some  variety  of  deep-sea  fishes.  The 
old  scholars  left  the  whole  underworld  of 
popular  compositions  in  a  similar  dark- 
ness. 

To-day,  however,  we  have  reversed  this 
principle.  We  do  despise  vulgar  composi- 
tions, and  we  do  not  ignore  them.  We  are 
in  some  danger  of  becoming  petty  in  our 
study  of  pettiness ;  there  is  a  terrible  Cir- 
cean  law  in  the  background  that  if  the  soul 
stoops  too  ostentatiously  to  examine  any- 
thing it  never  gets  up  again.  There  is  no 
class  of  vulgar  publications  about  which 
there  is,  to  my  mind,  more  utterly  ridicu- 
lous exaggeration  and  misconception  than 
the  current  boys'  literature  of  the  lowest 
stratum.  This  class  of  composition  has 
presumably  always  existed,  and  must  exist. 
It  has  no  more  claim  to  be  good  literature 
than  the  daily  conversation  of  its  readers  to 
[76] 


A  Defence  of  Penny  Dreadfuls 

be  fine  oratory,  or  the  lodging-houses  and 
tenements  they  inhabit  to  be  sublime  archi- 
tecture. But  people  must  have  conversa- 
tion, they  must  have  houses,  and  they  must 
have  stories.  The  simple  need  for  some 
kind  of  ideal  world  in  which  fictitious  per- 
sons play  an  unhampered  part  is  infinitely 
deeper  and  older  than  the  rules  of  good  art, 
and  much  more  important.  Every  one  of 
us  in  childhood  has  constructed  such  an 
invisible  dramatis  personce,  but  it  never  oc- 
curred to  our  nurses  to  correct  the  compo- 
sition by  careful  comparison  with  Balzac. 
In  the  East  the  professional  story-teller 
goes  from  village  to  village  with  a  small 
carpet ;  and  I  wish  sincerely  that  any  one 
had  the  moral  courage  to  spread  that  carpet 
and  sit  on  it  in  Ludgate  Circus.  But  it  is 
not  probable  that  all  the  tales  of  the  carpet- 
bearer  are  little  gems  of  original  artistic 
workmanship.  Literature  and  fiction  are 
two  entirely  different  things.     Literature  is 

[77] 


A  Defence  of  Penny  Dreadfuls 

a  luxury  ;  fiction  is  a  necessity.  A  work 
of  art  can  hardly  be  too  short,  for  its  climax 
is  its  merit.  A  story  can  never  be  too  long, 
for  its  conclusion  is  merely  to  be  deplored, 
like  the  last  halfpenny  or  the  last  pipelight. 
And  so,  while  the  increase  of  the  artistic 
conscience  tends  in  more  ambitious  works 
to  brevity  and  impressionism,  voluminous 
industry  still  marks  the  producer  of  the  true 
romantic  trash.  There  was  no  end  to  the 
ballads  of  Robin  Hood  ;  there  is  no  end  to 
the  volumes  about  Dick  Deadshot  and  the 
Avenging  Nine.  These  two  heroes  are  de- 
liberately conceived  as  immortal. 

But  instead  of  basing  all  discussion  of  the 
problem  upon  the  common-sense  recogni- 
tion of  this  fact — that  the  youth  of  the 
lower  orders  always  has  had  and  always 
must  have  formless  and  endless  romantic 
reading  of  some  kind,  and  then  going  on 
to  make  provision  for  its  wholesomeness — 
we  begin,  generally  speaking,  by  fantastic 

[78] 


A  Defence  of  Penny  Dreadfuls 

abuse  of  this  reading  as  a  whole  and  indig- 
nant surprise  that  the  errand-boys  under 
discussion  do  not  read  "The  Egoist,"  and 
"  The  Master  Builder."  It  is  the  cus- 
tom, particularly  among  magistrates,  to  at- 
tribute half  the  crimes*  of  the  Metropolis  to 
cheap  novelettes.  If  some  grimy  urchin  runs 
away  with  an  apple,  the  magistrate  shrewdly 
points  out  that  the  child's  knowledge  that 
apples  appease  hunger  is  traceable  to  some 
curious  literary  researches.  The  boys 
themselves,  when  penitent,  frequently  ac- 
cuse the  novelettes  with  great  bitterness, 
which  is  only  to  be  expected  from  young 
people  possessed  of  no  little  native  humour. 
If  I  had  forged  a  will,  and  could  obtain 
sympathy  by  tracing  the  incident  to  the  in- 
fluence of  Mr.  George  Moore's  novels,  I 
should  find  the  greatest  entertainment  in 
the  diversion.  At  any  rate,  it  is  firmly 
fixed  in  the  minds  of  most  people  that 
gutter-boys,  unlike  everybody  else  in  the 
[79] 


A  Defence  of  Penny  Dreadfuls 

community,  find  their  principal  motives  for 
conduct  in  printed  books. 

Now  it  is  quite  clear  that  this  objection, 
the  objection  brought  by  magistrates,  has 
nothing  to  do  with  literary  merit.  Bad 
story  writing  is  not  a  crime.  Mr.  Hall 
Caine  walks  the  streets  openly,  and  cannot 
be  put  in  prison  for  an  anticlimax.  The 
objection  rests  upon  the  theory  that  the 
tone  of  the  mass  of  boys'  novelettes  is 
criminal  and  degraded,  appealing  to  low 
cupidity,  and  low  cruelty.  This  is  the  mag- 
isterial theory,  and  this  is  rubbish. 

So  far  as  I  have  seen  them,  in  connection 
with  the  dirtiest  book-stalls  in  the  poorest 
districts,  the  facts  are  simply  these :  The 
whole  bewildering  mass  of  vulgar  juvenile 
literature  is  concerned  with  adventures, 
rambling,  disconnected  and  endless.  It 
does  not  express  any  passion  of  any  sort, 
for  there  is  no  human  character  of  any  sort. 
It  runs  eternally  in  certain  grooves  of  local 

[80] 


A  Defence  of  Penny  Dreadfuls 

and  historical  type  :  the  medieval  knight,  the 
eighteenth-century  duellist,  and  the  modern 
cowboy,  recur  with  the  same  stiff  sim- 
plicity as  the  conventional  human  figures  in 
an  Oriental  pattern.  I  can  quite  as  easily 
imagine  a  human  being  kindling  wild  appe- 
tites by  the  contemplation  of  his  Turkey 
carpet  as  by  such  dehumanized  and  naked 
narrative  as  this. 

Among  these  stories  there  are  a  certain 
number  which  deal  sympathetically  with 
the  adventures  of  robbers,  outlaws  and 
pirates,  which  present  in  a  dignified  and  ro- 
mantic light  thieves  and  murderers  like 
Dick  Turpin  and  Claude  Duval.  That 
is  to  say,  they  do  precisely  the  same 
thing  as  Scott's  "  Ivanhoe,"  Scott's  "  Rob 
Roy,"  Scott's  "  Lady  of  the  Lake/'  Byron's 
**  Corsair,"  Wordsworth's  **  Rob  Roy's 
Grave,"  Stevenson's  '*  Macaire,"  Mr.  Max 
Pemberton's  "  Iron  Pirate,"  and  a  thousand 
more  works  distributed  systematically  as 
[8i] 


A  Defence  of  Penny  Dreadfuls 

prizes  and  Christmas  presents.  Nobody 
imagines  that  an  admiration  of  Locksley  in 
"  Ivanhoe"  will  lead  a  boy  to  shoot  Jap- 
anese arrows  at  the  deer  in  Richmond  Park  ; 
no  one  thinks  that  the  incautious  opening 
of  Wordsworth  at  the  poem  on  Rob  Roy 
will  set  him  up  for  life  as  a  blackmailer. 
In  the  case  of  our  own  class,  we  recognize 
that  this  wild  life  is  contemplated  with 
pleasure  by  the  young,  not  because  it  is 
like  their  own  life,  but  because  it  is  dif- 
ferent from  it.  It  might  at  least  cross  our 
minds  that,  for  whatever  other  reason  the 
errand-boy  reads  "  The  Red  Revenge,"  it 
really  is  not  because  he  is  dripping  with  the 
gore  of  his  own  friends  and  relatives. 

In  this  matter,  as  in  all  such  matters,  wel 
lose  our  bearings  entirely   by  speaking  of 
the   "lower  classes"   when  we  mean  hu-y 
manity   minus   ourselvesj    This  trivial   ro- 
mantic literature  is  not  especially  plebeian  : 
it  is  simply  human.     The  philanthropist  can 

[82] 


A  Defence  of  Penny  Dreadfuls 

never  forget  classes  and  callings.  He  says, 
with  a  modest  swagger,  "  I  have  invited 
twenty-five  factory  hands  to  tea."  If  he. 
said,  "  I  have  invited  twenty-five  chartered 
accountants  to  tea,"  every  one  would  see 
the  humour  of  so  simple  a  classification. 
But  this  is  what  we  have  done  with  this 
lumberland  of  foolish  writing :  we  have 
probed,  as  if  it  were  some  monstrous  new 
disease,  what  is,  in  fact,  nothing  but  the 
foolish  and  valiant  heart  of  man.  Ordinary 
men  will  always  be  sentimentalists :  for  a 
sentimentalist  is  simply  a  man  who  has 
feelings  and  does  not  trouble  to  invent  a 
new  way  of  expressing  them.  These  com- 
mon and  current  publications  have  nothing 
essentially  evil  about  them.  They  express 
the  sanguine  and  heroic  truisms  on  which 
civilization  is  built ;  for  it  is  clear  that  un- 
less civilization  is  built  on  truisms,  it  is  not 
built  at  all.  Clearly,  there  could  be  no 
safety  for  a  society  in  which  the  remark  by 

[83] 


A  Defence  of  Penny  Dreadfuls 

the  Chief  Justice  that  murder  was  wrong 
was  regarded  as  an  original  and  dazzling 
epigram. 

If  the  authors  and  publishers  of  **  Dick 
Deadshot,"  and  such  remarkable  works 
were  suddenly  to  make  a  raid  upon  the 
educated  class,  were  to  take  down  the 
names  of  every  man,  however  distinguished, 
who  was  caught  at  a  University  Extension 
Lecture,  were  to  confiscate  all  our  novels 
and  warn  us  all  to  correct  our  lives,  we 
should  be  seriously  annoyed.  Yet  they 
have  far  more  right  to  do  so  than  we  ;  for 
they,  with  all  their  idiotcy,  are  normal  and 
we  are  abnormal.  It  is  the  modern  litera- 
ture of  the  educated,  not  of  the  uneducated, 
which  is  avowedly  and  aggressively  criminal. 
Books  recommending  prftfligacy  and  pessi- 
mism, at  which  the  high-souled  errand-boy 
would  shudder,  lie  upon  all  our  drawing- 
room  tables.  If  the  dirtiest  old  owner  of 
the  dirtiest  old  book-stall  in  Whitechapel 
[84] 


A  Defence  of  Penny  Dreadfuls 

dared  to  display  works  really  recommend- 
ing polygamy  or  suicide,  his  stock  would  be 
seized  by  the  police.  These  things  are  our 
luxuries.  And  with  a  hypocrisy  so  ludi- 
crous as  to  be  almost  unparalleled  in  history, 
we  rate  the  gutter-boys  for  their  immorality 
at  the  very  time  that  we  are  discussing  (with 
equivocal  German  Professors)  whether  mo- 
rality is  valid  at  all.  At  the  very  instant  that 
we  curse  the  Penny  Dreadful  for  encour- 
aging thefts  upon  property,  we  canvass  the 
proposition  that  all  property  is  theft.  At  the 
very  instant  we  accuse  it  (quite  unjustly)  of 
lubricity  and  indecency,  we  are  cheerfully 
reading  philosophies  which  glory  in  lubricity 
and  indecency.  At  the  very  instant  that  we 
charge  it  with  encouraging  the  young  to 
destroy  life,  we  are  placidly  discussing 
whether  life  is  worth  preserving. 

But  it  is  we  who  are  the  morbid  excep- 
tions ;  it  is  we  who  are  the  criminal  class. 
This   should  be  our  great  comfort.     The 

[85] 


A  Defence  of  Penny  Dreadfuls 

vast  mass  of  humanity,  with  their  vast  mass 
of  idle  books  and  idle  words,  have  never 
doubted  and  never  will  doubt  that  courage 
is  splendid,  that  fidelity  is  noble,  that  dis- 
tressed ladies  should  be  rescued,  and  van- 
quished enemies  spared.  There  are  a  large 
number  of  cultivated  persons  who  doubt 
these  maxims  of  daily  life,  just  as  there  are 
a  large  number  of  persons  who  believe  they 
are  the  Prince  of  Wales ;  and  I  am  told 
that  both  classes  of  people  are  entertaining 
conversationalists.  But  the  average  man  or 
boy  writes  daily  in  these  great  gaudy  diaries 
of  his  soul,  which  we  call  Penny  Dreadfuls, 
a  plainer  and  better  gospel  than  any  of 
those  iridescent  ethical  paradoxes  that  the 
fashionable  change  as  often  as  their  bonnets. 
It  may  be  a  very  limited  aim  in  morality  to 
shoot  a  "  many-faced  and  fickle  traitor/' 
but  at  least  it  is  a  better  aim  than  to  be  a 
many-faced  and  fickle  traitor,  which  is  a 
simple  summary  of  a  good  many  modern 
[86] 


A  Defence  of  Penny  Dreadfuls 

systems  from  Mr.  d'Annunzio's  downwards. 
So  long  as  the  coarse  and  thin  texture 
of  mere  current  popular  romance  is  not 
touched  by  a  paltry  culture  it  will  never  be 
vitally  immoral.  It  is  always  on  the  side 
of  life.  The  poor — the  slaves  who  really 
stoop  under  the  burden  of  life — have  often 
been  mad,  scatter-brained  and  cruel,  but 
never  hopeless.  That  is  a  class  privilege, 
like  cigars.  Their  drivelling  literature  will 
always  be  a  '*  blood  and  thunder"  litera- 
ture, as  simple  as  the  thunder  of  heaven 
and  the  blood  of  men. 


[87] 


MAETERLINCK 

THE  selection  of  "Thoughts  from 
Maeterlinck"  is  a  very  creditable 
and  also  a  very  useful  compilation.  Many 
modern  critics  object  to  the  hacking  and 
hewing  of  a  consistent  writer  which  is 
necessary  for  this  kind  of  work,  but  upon 
more  serious  consideration,  the  view  is  not 
altogether  adequate.  Maeterlinck  is  a  very 
great  man ;  and  in  the  long  run  this  process 
of  mutilation  has  happened  to  all  great  men. 
It  was  the  mark  of  a  great  patriot  to  be 
drawn  and  quartered  and  his  head  set  on 
one  spike  in  one  city  and  his  left  leg  on  an- 
other spike  in  another  city.  It  was  the 
mark  of  a  saint  that  even  these  fragments 
began  to  work  miracles.  So  it  has  been 
with  all  the  very  great  men  of  the  world. 
However  careless,   however  botchy,   may 


Maeterlinck 

be  the  version  of  Maeterlinck  or  of  any 
one  else  given  in  such  a  selection  as  this,  it 
is  assuredly  far  less  careless  and  far  less 
botchy  than  the  version,  the  parody,  the 
wild  misrepresentation  of  Maeterlinck 
which  future  ages  will  hear  and  distant 
critics  be  called  upon  to  consider. 

No  one  can  feel  any  reasonable  doubt 
that  we  have  heard  about  Christ  and  Soc- 
rates and  Buddha  and  St.  Francis  a  mere 
chaos  of  excerpts,  a  mere  book  of  quota- 
tions. But  from  those  fragmentary  epi- 
grams we  can  deduce  greatness  as  clearly 
,13  Awe  uar.  deduce  Venus  from  the  torso  of 
Venus  or  Hercules  ex  pede  Herculem.  If 
we  knew  lothing  else  about  the  Founder 
)f  Christianity,  for  example,  beyond  the 
f'lct  that  a  religious  teacher  lived  in  a  re- 
aiote  country,  and  in  the  course  of  His 
peregrina'  ns  and  proclamations  consist- 
ently called  Himself  "  the  Son  of  Man," 
we  shoulr^  '\now  by  that  alone  that  He  was 

[89] 


Maeterlinck 

a  man  of  almost  immeasurable  greatness. 
If  future  ages  happened  to  record  nothing 
else  about  Socrates  except  that  he  owned 
his  title  to  be  the  wisest  of  men  because  he 
knew  that  he  knew  nothing,  they  would  be 
able  to  deduce  from  that  the  height  and 
energy  of  his  civilization,  the  glory  that  was 
Greece.  The  credit  of  such  random  com- 
pilations as  that  which  "  E.  S.  S."  and  Mr. 
George  Allen  have  just  effected  is  quite  se- 
cure. It  is  the  pure,  pedantic,  literal  edi- 
tions, the  complete  works  of  this  author  or 
that  author  which  are  forgotten.  It  is  such 
books  as  this  that  have  revolutionized  the 
destiny  of  the  world.  Great  things  .• 
Christianity  or  Platonism  have  never  e. 
founded  upon  consistent  editions  ;  a'l  of 
them  have  been  founded  upon  scrap-be -o^ 
The  position  of  Maeterlinck  in  m.';.vjrn 
life  is  a  thing  too  obvious  to  be  easily  de- 
termined in  words.  It  is,  perhaps,  best 
expressed  by  saying  that  it  is  th(  great 
[  9°  ] 


Maeterlinck 

glorification  of  the  inside  of  things  at  the 
expense  of  the  outside.  There  is  one  great 
evil  in  modern  life  for  which  nobody  has 
found  even  approximately  a  tolerable  de- 
scription :  I  can  only  invent  a  word  and 
call  it  "  remotism."  It  is  the  tendency  to 
think  first  of  things  which,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  lie  far  away  from  the  actual  centre  of 
human  experience.  Thus  people  say,  "  All 
our  knowledge  of  life  begins  with  the 
amoeba."  It  is  false ;  our  knowledge  of 
life  begins  with  ourselves.  Thus  they  say 
that  the  British  Empire  is  glorious,  and  at 
the  very  word  Empire  they  think  at  once 
Df  Australia  and  New  Zealand,  and  Canada, 
and  Polar  bears,  and  parrots  and  kangaroos, 
and  it  never  occurs  to  any  one  of  them  to 
think  of  the  Surrey  Hills.  Tne  one  real 
struggle  in  modern  life  is  the  struggle  be- 
tween the  man  like  Maeterlinck,  who  sees 
inside  as  the  truth,  and  the  man  like 
Z>jla,  who  sees  the  outside  as  the  truth.    A 

[91] 


Maeterlinck 

hundred  cases  might  be  given.  We  may 
take,  for  the  sake  of  argument,  the  case  of 
what  is  called  falling  in  love.  The  sincere 
realist,  the  man  who  believes  in  a  certain 
finality  in  physical  science,  says,  **  You 
may,  if  you  like,  describe  this  thing  as  a 
divine  and  sacred  and  incredible  vision  ; 
that  is  your  sentimental  theory  about  it. 
But  what  it  is  is  an  animal  and  sexual  in- 
stinct designed  for  certain  natural  pur- 
poses." The  man  on  the  other  side,  the 
idealist,  replies,  with  quite  equal  confi- 
dence, that  this  is  the  very  reverse  of  the 
truth.  I  put  it  as  it  has  always  struck  me  ; 
he  replies,  ''  Not  at  all.  You  may,  if  you 
like,  describe  this  thing  as  an  animal  and 
sexual  instinct,  designed  for  certain  natural 
purposes ;  that  is  your  philosophical  or 
zoological  theory  about  it.  What  it  is,  be- 
yond all  doubt  of  any  kind,  is  a  divine  and 
sacred  and  incredible  vision."  The  fact 
that  it  is  an  animal  necessity  only  comes  to 

[92] 


Maeterlinck 

the  naturalistic  philosopher  after  looking 
abroad,  studying  its  origins  and  results, 
constructing  an  explanation  of  its  existence, 
more  or  less  natural  and  conclusive.  The 
fact  that  it  is  a  spiritual  triumph  comes  to 
the  first  errand  boy  who  happens  to  feel  it. 
If  a  lad  of  seventeen  falls  in  love  and  is 
struck  dead  by  a  hansom  cab  an  hour  after- 
wards, he  has  known  the  thing  as  it  is,  a 
spiritual  ecstasy ;  he  has  never  come  to 
trouble  about  the  thing  as  it  may  be,  a 
physical  destiny.  If  any  one  says  that  fall- 
ing in  love  is  an  animal  thing,  the  answer  is 
very  simple.  The  only  way  of  testing  the 
matter  is  to  ask  those  who  are  experienc- 
ing it,  and  none  of  those  would  admit  for  a 
moment  that  it  was  an  animal  thing. 

Maeterlinck's  appearance  in  Europe 
means  primarily  this  subjective  intensity ; 
by  this  the  materialism  is  not  overthrown  : 
materialism  is  undermined.  He  brings, 
not  sometb-r,;  which   is  more  poetic  than 

[93] 


Maeterlinck 

realism,  not  some'^h"rng  wliich  is  more  spir- 
itual than  realism,  not  something  which  is 
more  right  than  realism,  but  something 
which  is  more  real  than  realism.  He  dis- 
covers the  one  indestructible  thing.  This 
material  world  on  which  such  vast  systems 
have  been  superimposed — this  may  mean 
anything.  It  may  be  a  dream,  it  may  be  a 
joke,  it  may  be  a  trap  or  temptation,  it  may 
be  a  charade,  it  may  be  the  beatific  vision : 
the  only  thing  of  which  we  are  certain  is 
this  human  soul.  This  human  soul  finds 
itself  alone  in  a  terrible  world,  afraid  of  the 
grass.  It  has  brought  forth  poetry  and  re- 
ligion in  order  to  explain  matters  ;  it  will 
bring  them  forth  again.  It  matters  not  one 
atom  how  often  the  lulls  of  materialism  and 
scepticism  occur ;  they  are  always  broken 
by  the  reappearance  of  a  fanatic.  They 
have  come  in  our  time :  they  have  been 
broken  by  Maeterlinck. 

[94] 


■^.o  <.<iu-<lA'«-<^ 


ON    LYING   IN    BED 

LYING  in  bed  would  be  an  altogether 
perfect  and  supreme  experience  if 
only  one  had  a  coloured  pencil  long  enough 
to  draw  on  the  ceiling.  This,  however,  is 
not  generally  a  part  of  the  domestic  appa- 
ratus on  the  premises.  I  think  myself  that 
the  thing^  might  be  managed  with  several 
pails  of-Aspinall  and  a  broom.  Only  if  one 
worked  in  a  really  sweeping  and  masterly 
way,  and  laid  on  the  colour  in  great  washes, 
it  might  drip  down  again  on  one's  face  in 
floods  of  rich  and  mingled  colour  like  some 
strange  fairy-rain ;  and  that  would  have  its 
disadvantages.  I  am  afraid  itwould  be  neces- 
sary to  stick  to  black  and  white  in  this  form 
of  artistic  composition.  To  that  purpose, 
indeed,  the  white  ceiling  would  be  of  the 
greatest  possible  use ;  in  fact  it  is  the  only 
use  ji  liiu.v  .;f  a  white  ceiling  being  put  to. 


f 


On    Lying   in    Bed 

But  for  the  beautiful  experiment  of  lying 
in  bed  I  might  never  have  discovered  it. 
For  years  I  have  been  looking  for  some 
blank  spaces  in  a  modern  house  to  draw  on. 
Paper  is  much  too  small  for  any  really  alle- 
gorical   design ;    qo   Cyraao   dc    DLrgtiac 

-cc^yc;'     <<  Tl   mP  fqiif   Hnr   rrnnnU   ''        But  when 

I  tried  to  find  these  fine  clear  spaces  in  the 
modern  rooms  such  as  we  all  live  in^I  was 
continually  disappointed.  I  found  an  end- 
less pattern  and  complication  of  small 
objects  hung  like  a  curtain  of  fine  links  be- 
tween me  and  my  desire.  I  examined  the 
walls ;  I  found  them  to  my  surprise  to  be 
already  covered  with  wall-paper,  and  I 
found  the  wall-paper  to  be  already  covered 
with  very  uninteresting  images,  all  bearing 
a  ridiculous  resemblance  to  each  other.  I 
could  not  understand  why  one  arbitrary 
symbol  (a  symbol  apparently  entirely  de- 
void of  any  religious  or  philosophical  sig- 
nificance) should  thus  be  sprinkled  all  over 

[96] 


t 


On   Lying  in   Bed 

my  nic  I'allr,  like  a  sort  of  smallpox.  -Dw 
•Biblft-  '■'■*  ^-^^  rofcrring  to  wallpapers,  I 
think,  wnen  it  sayS)  '^  Uao  not  vain  ropcti- 
tinn<:^  g<i  fhp  '^^nt'hn  4^ '"  I  found  the 
Turkey  carpet  a  mass  of  unmeaning  colours, 
rather  like  the  Turkish  Empire,  or  like  the 
sweetmeat  called  Turkish  delight.  I  do 
not  exactly  know  what  Turkish  delight 
really  is;  but  I  suppose  it  is  Macedonian 
Massacres.  Everywhere  that  I  went  for- 
lornly, with  my  pencil  or  my  paint  brush,  I 
found  that  others  had  unaccountably  been 
before  me,  spoiling  the  walls,  the.  curtains, 
and  the  furniture  with  their  childish  and 
barbaric  designs. 

***** 
Nowhere  did  I  find  a  really  clear  place 
for  sketching  until  this  occasion  when  I 
prolonged  beyond  the  proper  limit  the 
process  of  lying  on  my  back  in  bed.  |-%-&a 
H^e-  Uglil-of  that-\4rhitp  henve^i-fefeke-xrpon 
my.JWj>ioR,  that  breadth  of  mere  white  which 

[97] 


On   Lying  in  Bed 

is  indeed  almost  the  definiti: :,  oi  irfaradise, 
since  it  meansVurity  and  also  rpeans  free- 
dom. But  alas  IXlike  all  heavens,  now  that 
it  is  seen  it  is  found  to  be  unattainable ;  it 
looks  more  austere  \and  rjlore  distant  than 
the  blue  sky  outside  the  window.  For  my 
proposal  to  paint  on  irywith  the  bristly  end 
of  a  broom  has  been  discouraged — never 
mind  by  whom ;  by  a  person  debarred  from 
all  political  rights — and  even  my  minor 
proposal  to  put  the  other  end  of  the  broom 
into  the  kitchen  fire  and  turn  it  into  char- 
coal  has  ^ot  been  conceded.  '^^J  I  am 
certain  t^Mbt  it  was  from  persons  in  my  po- 
sition that  all  the  original  inspiration  came 
for  covering  the  ceilings  of  palaces  and 
cathedrals  with  a  riot  of  fallen  angels  or 
victorious  gods.  I  am  sure  that  it  was  only 
because  Michael  Angelo  was  engaged  in 
the  ancient  and  honourable  occupation  of 
lying  in  bed  that  he  ever  realized  how  the 
roof  of  the  Sistine  Chapel  might  be  made 

[98] 


On   Lying  in   Bko 

mto  aL  awful  imitation  of       nvine  dramii 
that  could  only  be  acted  in  the  heavens.        ««j« 
The  tone  now  commonly  taken  towards     •  '^ 
the  practice  of  lyin^  in  bed  is  hypocritical 


and  unhealthy.  ^Of/all  the  m^rks  of  mod- 

/de 
dence,  ^ere  is  a'one  mo/e  mena(fing  ^d 


ernity  that,  seem  tp  mean  a/kind  o/dec^- 


r  that. 

:,  ^er  ^  /      - 

dangerous  than.^he  exultation  o^ery  small 


7 
and  secondary  matters/^  of  coi^uct  at  the 

expense  of  Xery  great^and  primary  ones,  at 

the   expose   of  ete^nal^^lbjig  -arH  tragic  _ 

humary^  mora[)tyr  J  If    there    is    one    thing 

worse  than  the  modern  weakening  of  major 

morals  it  is  the  modern  strengthening  of 

minor  morals.     Thus  it  is  considered  more 

withering  to  accuse  a  man  of  bad  taste  than 

of  bad  ethics.     Cleanliness  is  not  next  to 

godliness  nowadays,  for  cleanliness  is  made 

an  essential  and  godliness  is^egardecjjjfs  an 

offence.    \a  pia^right  can  attack  the  insti- 

tution  of  marriagK^so  long^s  he  does  not 

misrepreseht  the  mam^^rs  of  sob^ty,  and  I 


On   L    ing   in    Bed 

have  met  Ibsenit'.  pessimists  who  thought 
it  wrong  tol  take  beer  but  right  to  take 
prussic  acidA  Especially  this  is  so  in  mat- 
ters of  hygieire ;  notably  such  matters  as 
lying  in  bed.  Instead  of  being  regarded, 
^«  .V  ....£)'"■  "-^  '^^j  ^^  ^  matter  of  personal 
convenience  and  adjustment,  it  has  come  to 
be  regarded  by  man}r,as  if  it  were  a  part  of 
essential  morals  to  get\jp  early  in  the  morn- 
ing. It  is  upon  the  whok  part  of  practical 
wisdom ;  but  there  is  notnV^ig  good  about 

it  or  bad  about  its  opposite. 

***** 

Misers  get  up\early  in  the  morning;  and 
burglars,  I  am  informed,  g^t  up  the  night 
before.  It  is  the  great  peril  of  our  society 
that  all  its  mechanism,  may  grow  more  fixed 
while  its  spirit  grows  more  fickle.  A  man's 
minor  actions  and  arraCigements  ought  to 
be  free,  flexible,  creative;  the  things  tha* 
should  be  unchan,geable  \re  his  principles 
his  ideals.  But  v^jith  us  the  reverse  is  true 
[  loo] 


our  views  ci^^i.^ge  cuusLantiy;  Dut  our  lunch 
does  not  ci^i'n5<^  Now,  I  sbouiet  like  men 
to  have  strong  and  rooted  to^qeptions, 
but  as  for  their  lunch,  let  them  have  it 
sometimes  in  the  garden,  sometimes  in 
bed,  sometimes  on  the  roof,  sometimes  in 
the  top  of  a  tree.  Let  them  argue  from 
the  same  first  principles,  but  let  them 
do  it  in  a  bed,  or  a  boat,  or  a  balloon. 
This  alarming  growth  of  good  habits  really 
means  a  too  great  emphasis  on  those  virtues 
which  mere  custom  can  misuse,  it  means 
too  little  emphasis  on  those  virtues  which 
custom  can  never  quite  ensure,  sadden  and 
splendid  virtues  of  inspired  pity  or  of  in- 
spired candour.  If  ever  that  abrupt  appeal 
is  made  to  us  we  may  fail.  \  A  man  can  get 
used  to  getting  up  at  five  \o'clock  in  the 
morning.  A  man  cannot  werf  well  get  used 
to  being  burned  for  his  opinions ;  the  first 
experimen't  is  commonly  fatal.  Let  us  pay 
a  little  m'pvQ  attention  to  thesepossibilities 

[  lOI  ] 


V 


On    Lying   in    Bed 

of  the  heroicAnd  the  unejipectcd.  I  dare 
say  that  when  I  get  out^of  this  bed  I  shall 
do  some  d^ed  of  an  alitio^  terrible  virtue. 

For  those  who  study  the  great  art  of 
lying  in  bed  there  is  one  emphatic  caution 
to  be  added.  Even  for  those  who  can  do 
their  work  in  bed  (like  journalist^,  still 
more  for  those  whose  work  cannot  be  done 
in  bed  (as,  for  example,  the  professional 
harpooner  of  whales),  it  is  obvious  that  the 
indulgence  must  be  very  occasional.  But 
that  is  not  the  caution  I  mean.  The  caution 
is  this :  if  you  do  lie  in  bed,  be  sure  you  do 
it  without  any  reason  or  justification  at  all. 
I  do  not  speak,  of  course,  of  the  seriously 
sick.  But  if  a  healthy  man  lies  in  bed,  let 
him  do  it  without  a  rag  of  excuse ;  then  he 
will  get  up  a  healthy  man.  If  he  does  it 
for  some  secondary  hygienic  reason,  if  he 
has  some  scientific  explanation,  he  may  get 
up  a  hypochondriac. 

[  102] 


THE    LITTLE  BIRDS  WHO  WONT 
SING 

ON  my  last  morning  on  the  Flemish 
coast,  when  I  knew  that  in  a  few 
hours  I  should  be  in  England,  my  eye  fell 
upon  one  of  the  details  of  Gothic  carving 
of  which  Flanders  is  full.  I  do  not  know 
whether  the  thing  was  old,  though  it  was 
certainly  knocked  about  and  indecipher- 
able, but  at  least  it  was  certainly  in  the 
style  and  tradition  of  the  early  Middle 
Ages.  It  seemed  to  represent  men  bend- 
ing themselves  (not  to  say  twisting  them- 
selves) to  certain  primary  employments. 
Some  seemed  to  be  sailors  tugging  at 
ropes  ;  others,  I  think,  were  reaping ; 
others  were  energetically  pouring  some- 
thing into  something  else.  This  is  entirely 
characteristic  of  the  pictures  and  carvings 


The  Little  Birds  Who  Won't  Sing 

of  the  early  thirteenth  century,  perhaps  the 
most  purely  vigorous  time  in  all  history. 
The  great  Greeks  preferred  to  carve  their 
gods  and  heroes  doing  nothing.  Splendid 
and  philosophic  as  their  composure  is  there 
is  always  about  it  something  that  marks  the 
master  of  many  slaves.  But  if  there  was 
one  thing  the  early  mediaevals  liked  it  was 
representing  people  doing  something — 
hunting  or  hawking,  or  rowing  boats,  or 
treading  grapes,  or  making  shoes,  or  cook- 
ing something  in  a  pot.  "  Quicquid  agunt 
homines,  votum,  timor,  ira  voiuptas."  (I 
quote  from  memory.)  The  Middle  Ages 
is  full  of  that  spirit  in  all  its  monuments 
and  manuscripts.  Chaucer  retains  it  in  his 
jolly  insistence  on  everybody's  type  of  trade 
and  toil.  It  was  the  earliest  and  youngest 
resurrection  of  Europe,  the  time  when 
social  order  was  strengthening,  but  had  not 
yet  become  oppressive  ;  the  time  when  re- 
ligious faiths  were  strong,  but  had  not  yet 
[  104  ] 


The  Little  Birds  Who  Won't  Sing 

been  exasperated.  For  this  reason  the 
whole  effect  of  Greek  and  Gothic  carving 
is  different.  The  figures  in  the  Elgin 
marbles,  though  often  reining  their  steeds 
for  an  instant  in  the  air,  seem  frozen  for- 
ever at  that  perfect  instant.  But  a  mass  of 
mediaeval  carving  seems  actually  a  sort  of 
bustle  or  hubbub  in  stone.  Sometimes  one 
cannot  help  feeling  that  the  groups  actually 
move  and  mix,  and  the  whole  front  of  a 
great  cathedral  has  the  hum  of  a  huge  hive. 
*  *  *  *  * 

But  about  these  particular  figures  there 
was  a  peculiarity  of  which  I  could  not  be 
sure.  Those  of  them  that  had  any  heads 
had  very  curious  heads,  and  it  seemed  to 
me  that  they  had  their  mouths  open. 
Whether  or  no  this  really  meant  anything 
or  was  an  accident  of  nascent  art  I  do  not 
know ;  but  in  the  course  of  wondering  I 
recalled  to  my  mind  the  fact  that  singing 
was  connected  with  many  of  the  tasks 
[105] 


The  Little  Birds  Who  Won't  Sing 

there  suggested,  that  there  were  songs  for 
reapers  reaping  and  songs  for  sailors  haul- 
ing ropes.  I  was  still  thinking  about  this 
small  problem  when  I  walked  along  the 
pier  at  Ostend  ;  and  I  heard  some  sailors 
uttering  a  measured  shout  as  they  laboured, 
and  I  remembered  that  sailors  still  sing  in 
chorus  while  they  work,  and  even  sing  dif- 
ferent songs  according  to  what  part  of  their 
work  they  are  doing.  And  a  little  while 
afterwards,  when  my  sea  journey  was  over, 
the  sight  of  men  working  in  the  English 
fields  reminded  me  again  that  there  are  still 
songs  for  harvest  and  for  many  agricultural 
routines.  And  I  suddenly  wondered  why 
if  this  were  so  it  should  be  quite  unknown 
for  any  modern  trade  to  have  a  ritual 
poetry.  How  did  people  come  to  chant 
rude  poems  while  pulling  certain  ropes  or 
gathering  certain  fruit,  and  why  did  nobody 
do  anything  of  the  kind  while  producing 
any  of  the  modern  things  >  Why  is  a 
[io6] 


The  Little  Birds  Who  Won't  Sing 

modern  newspaper  never  printed  by  people 
singing  in  chorus  >  Why  do  shopmen  sel- 
dom, if  ^ver,  sing  > 


If  reapers  sing  while  reaping,  why  should 
not  auditors  sing  while  auditing  and  bank- 
ers while  banking  ?  If  there  are  songs  for 
all  the  separate  things  that  have  to  be  done 
in  a  boat,  why  are  there  not  songs  for  all 
the  separate  things  that  have  to  be  done  in 
a  bank?  As  the  train  from  Dover  flew 
through  the  Kentish  gardens,  I  tried  to 
write  a  few  songs  suitable  for  commercial 
gentlemen.  Thus,  the  work  of  bank  clerks 
when  casting  up  columns  might  begin  with 
a  thundering  chorus  in  praise  of  Simple 
Addition. 

"  Up  my  lads  and  lift  the  ledgers,  sleep  and  ease  are 
o'er. 
Hear  the  Stars  of  Morning  shouting :  *  Two  and 
Two  are  four.' 

[107] 


The  Little  Birds  Who  Wo;    :  ^^  ag 

ThougH  the  creeds  and  realms  are  reeling,  though 
the  sophists  roar, 
Though  we  weep  and  pawn  our  watches,  Two 
and  Two  are  four. 

"  There's  a  run  upon  the  Bank — 
Stand  away  ! 
For   the   Manager's   a   crank  and   the    Secretary 
drank,  and  the  Upper  Tooting  Bank 
Turns  to  bay ! 
Stand  close  :  there  is  a  run 

On  the  Bank. 
Of  our  ship,  our  royal  one,  let  the  ringing  legend 
run,  that  she  fired  with  every  gun 
Ere  she  sank." 


And  as  I  came  into  the  cloud  of  London 
I  met  a  friend  of  mine  who  actually  is  in  a 
bank,  and  submitted  these  suggestions  in 
rhyme  to  him  for  use  among  his  colleagues. 
But  he  was  not  very  hopeful  about  the  mat- 
ter. It  was  not  (he  assured  me)  that  he 
underrated  the  verses,  or  in  any  sense  la- 
mented their  lack  of  polish.  No  ;  it  was 
rather,  he  felt,  an  indefinable  something  in 
[io8] 


The  Little  Birds  Who  Won't  Sing 

the  very  atmosphere  of  the  society  in  which 
we  live  that  makes  it  spiritually  difficult  to 
sing  in  banks.  And  I  think  he  must  be 
right ;  though  the  matter  is  very  mysterious. 
I  may  observe  here  that  I  think  there  must 
be  some  mistake  in  the  calculations  of  the 
Socialists.  They  put  down  all  our  distress, 
not  to  a  moral  tone,  but  to  the  chaos  of 
private  enterprise.  Now,  banks  are  pri- 
vate ;  but  post-offices  are  Socialistic :  there- 
fore I  naturally  expected  that  the  post-office 
would  fall  into  the  collectivist  idea  of  a 
chorus.  Judge  of  my  surprise  when  the 
lady  in  my  local  post-office  (whom  I  urged 
to  sing)  dismissed  the  idea  with  far  more 
coldness  than  the  bank  clerk  had  done. 
She  seemed,  indeed,  to  be  in  a  consider- 
ably greater  state  of  depression  than  he. 
Should  any  one  suppose  that  this  was  the 
effect  of  the  verses  themselves,  it  is  only 
fair  to  say  that  the  specimen  verse  of  the 
Post-Office  Hymn  ran  thus  : 
[  109] 


Tre  Little  Birds  Who  Won't  Sing 

"  O'er  London  our  letters  are  shaken  like  snow, 
Our  wires  o'er  the  world  like  the  thunderbolts  go. 
The  news  that  may  marry  a  maiden  in  Sark, 
Or  kill  an  old  lady  in  Finsbury  Park." 

Chorus  (with  a  swing  of  joy  and  energy)  : 
«•  Or  kill  an  old  lady  in  Finsbury  Park." 

And  the  more  I  thought  about  the  matter 
the  more  painfully  certain  it  seemed  that 
the  most  important  and  typical  modern 
things  could  not  be  done  with  a  chorus. 
One  could  not,  for  instance,  be  a  great 
financier  and  sing ;  because  the  essence  of 
being  a  great  financier  is  that  you  keep 
quiet.  You  could  not  even  in  many 
modern  circles  be  a  public  man  and  sing ; 
because  in  those  circles  the  essence  of  be- 
ing a  public  man  is  that  you  do  nearly 
everything  in  private.  Nobody  would  im- 
agine a  chorus  of  money-lenders.  Every 
one  knows  the  story  of  the  solicitors'  corps 
of  volunteers  who,  when  the  Colonel  on  the 
battle-field  cried,  "  Charge  1  "  all  said  simul- 
[no  J 


The  Little  Birds  Who  Won't  Sing 

taneously,  "  Six-and-eightpence."  Men 
can  sing  while  charging  in  a  military,  but 
hardly  in  a  legal  sense.  And  at  the  end  of 
my  reflections  I  had  really  got  no  further 
than  the  subconscious  feeling  of  my  friend 
the  bank  clerk — that  there  is  something 
spiritually  suffocating  about  our  life  ;  not 
about  our  laws  merely,  but  about  our  life. 
Bank  clerks  are  without  songs,  not  because 
they  are  poor,  but  because  they  are  sad. 
Sailors  are  much  poorer.  As  I  passed 
homewards  I  passed  a  little  tin  building  of 
some  religious  sort,  which  was  shaken  with 
shouting  as  a  trumpet  is  torn  with  its  own 
tongue.  They  were  singing  anyhow  ;  and 
I  had  for  an  instant  a  fancy  I  had  often  had 
before  :  that  with  us  the  superhuman  is  the 
only  place  where  you  can  find  the  human. 
Human  nature  is  hunted,  and  has  fled  into 
sanctuary. 


[Ill] 


A  TRAGEDY   OF    TWOPENCE 

MY  relations  with  the  readers  of  this 
page  have  been  long  and  pleasant, 
but — perhaps  for  that  very  reason — I  feel 
that  the  time  has  come  when  I  ought  to 
confess  the  one  great  crime  of  my  life.  It 
happened  a  long  time  ago  ;  but  it  is  not 
uncommon  for  a  belated  burst  of  remorse 
to  reveal  such  dark  episodes  long  after  they 
have  occurred.  It  has  nothing  to  do  with 
the  orgies  of  the  Anti-Puritan  League. 
That  body  is  so  offensively  respectable  that 
a  newspaper,  in  describing  it  the  other  day, 
referred  to  my  friend  Mr.  Edgar  Jepson  as 
Canon  Edgar  Jepson  ;  and  it  is  believed 
that  similar  titles  are  intended  for  all  of  us. 
No  ;  it  is  not  by  the  conduct  of  Archbishop 
Crane,  of  Dean  Chesterton,  of  the  Rev. 


A  Tragedy  of  Twopence 

James  Douglas,  of  Monsignor  Bland,  and 
even  of  that  fine  and  virile  old  ecclesiastic, 
Cardinal  Nesbit,  that  I  wish  (or  rather,  am 
driven  by  my  conscience)  to  make  this 
declaration.  The  crime  was  committed  in 
solitude  and  without  accomplices.  Alone  I 
« did  it.  Let  me,  with  the  characteristic 
thirst  of  penitents  to  get  the  worst  of  the 
confession  over,  state  it  first  of  all  in 
its  most  dreadful  and  indefensible  form. 
There  is  at  the  present  moment,  in  a  town 
in  Germany  (unless  he  has  died  of  rage  on 
discovering  his  wrong),  a  restaurant-keeper 
to  whom  I  still  owe  twopence.  I  last  bit 
his  open-air  restaurant  knowing  that  I  owed 
him  twopence.  I  carried  it  away  under  his 
nose,  despite  the  fact  that  the  nose  v.  as  a 
decidedly  Jewish  one.  I  have  never  paid 
him,  and  it  is  highly  improbable  that  I  ever 
shall.  How  did  this  villainy  come  to  occur 
in  a  life  which  has  been,  generally  speaking, 
deficient  in  the  dexterity  necessary  for 
["3] 


A  Tragedy  of  Twopence 

fraud?  The  story  is  as  follows — and  it  has 
a  moral,  though  there  may  not  be  room  for 
that. 


It  is  a  fair  general  rule  for  those  travel- 
ling on  the  Continent  that  the  easiest  way 
of  talking  in  a  foreign  language  is  to  talk, 
philosophy.  The  most  difficult  kind  of 
talking  is  to  talk  about  common  necessities. 
The  reason  is  obvious.  The  names  of 
common  necessities  vary  completely  with 
each  nation  and  are  generally  somewhat  odd 
iivid  qi'.iint.  How,  for  instance,  could  a 
Frenchman  suppose  that  a  coalbox  would 
be  called  a  "scuttle"?  It  he  has  ever 
ieen  the  word  scuttle  it  has  been  in  the 
Jingo  Press,  where  the  "  policy  of  scuttle  " 
is  used  whenever  we  give  up  something  to 
a  small  Power  like  Liberals,  instead  of  giv- 
ing up  everything  to  a  great  Power  like 
Imperialists.  "What  Englishman  in  Ger- 
["4] 


A  Tragedy  of  Twopence 

many  would  be  poet  enough  to  guess  that 
the  Germans  call  a  glove  a  "  hand-shoe''  ? 
Nations  name  their  necessities  by  nick- 
names, so  to  speak.  They  call  their  tubs 
and  stools  by  quaint,  elvish,  and  almost 
affectionate  names,  as  if  they  were  their 
own  children  1  But  any  one  can  argue 
about  abstract  things  in  a  foreign  language 
who  has  ever  got  as  far  Exercise  IV.  in  a 
primer.  For  as  soon  as  he  can  put  a  sen- 
tence together  at  all  he  finds  that  the  words 
used  in  abstract  or  philosophical  discussions 
are  almost  the  same  in  all  nations.  They 
are  the  same,  for  the  simple  reason  that 
they  all  come  from  the  things  that  were  the 
roots  of  our  common  civilization.  From 
Christianity,  from  the  Roman  Empire,  from 
the  mediaeval  Church,  or  the  French  Revo- 
lution. ''  Nation,"  "  citizen,"  "  religion," 
'•philosophy,"  ''authority,"  "the  Repub- 
lic," words  like  these  are  nearly  the  same  in 
all  the  countries  in  which  we  travel.  Re- 
[115] 


A  Tragedy  of  Twopence 

strain,  therefore,  your  exuberant  admiration 
for  the  young  man  who  can  argue  with  six 
French  atheists  when  he  first  lands  at 
Dieppe.  Even  I  can  do  that.  But  very 
likely  the  same  young  man  does  not  know 
the  French  for  a  shoe-horn.  But  to  this 
generalization  there  are  three  great  excep- 
tions, (i)  In  the  case  of  countries  that  are 
not  European  at  all,  and  have  never  had  our 
civic  conceptions,  or  the  old  Latin  scholar- 
ship. I  do  not  pretend  that  the  Patagonian 
phrase  for  ''citizenship"  at  once  leaps  to 
the  mind,  or  that  a  Dyak's  word  for  "  the 
Republic "  has  been  familiar  to  me  from 
the  nursery.  (2)  In  the  case  of  Germany, 
where,  although  the  principle  does  apply 
to  many  words  such  as  "  nation  "  and  "  phi- 
losophy," it  does  not  apply  so  generally, 
because  Germany  has  had  a  special  and  de- 
liberate policy  of  encouraging  the  purely 
German  part  of  its  language.  (3)  In  the 
case  where  one  does  not  know  any  of  the 

[116] 


A  Tragedy  of  Twopence 

language   at   all,   as   is  generally  the  case 
with  me. 

***** 

Such  at  least  was  my  situation  on  the 
dark  day  on  which  I  committed  my  crime. 
Two  of  the  exceptional  conditions  which  I 
have  mentioned  were  combined.  I  was 
walking  about  a  German  town,  and  I  knew 
no  German.  I  knew,  however,  two  or 
three  of  those  great  and  solemn  words 
which  hold  our  European  civilization  to- 
gether— one  of  which  is  *' cigar."  As  it 
was  a  hot  and  dreamy  day,  I  sat  down  at  a 
table  in  a  sort  of  beer-garden,  and  ordered 
a  cigar  and  a  pot  of  lager.  I  drank  the 
lager,  and  paid  for  it,  I  smoked  the  cigar, 
forgot  to  pay  for  it,  and  walked  away,  gaz- 
ing rapturously  at  the  royal  outline  of  the 
Taunus  mountains.  After  about  ten  min- 
utes, I  suddenly  remembered  that  I  had  not 
paid  for  the  cigar.  I  went  back  to  the  place 
of  refreshment,  and  put  down  the  money. 


A  Tragedy   of  Twopence 

But  the  proprietor  also  had  forgotten  the 
cigar,  and  he  merely  said  guttural  things 
in  a  tone  of  query,  asking  me,  I  suppose, 
what  I  wanted.  I  said  "cigar,"  and  he  gave 
me  a  cigar.  I  endeavoured  while  putting 
down  the  money  to  wave  away  the  cigar 
with  gestures  of  refusal.  He  thought  that 
my  rejection  was  of  the  nature  of  a  con- 
demnation of  that  particular  cigar,  and 
brought  me  another.  I  whirled  my  arms 
like  a  windmill,  seeking  to  convey  by  the 
sweeping  universality  of  my  gesture  that  my 
rejection  was  a  rejection  of  cigars  in 
general,  not  of  that  particular  article.  He 
mistook  this  for  the  ordinary  impatience  of 
common  men,  and  rushed  forward,  his 
hands  filled  with  miscellaneous  cigars,  press- 
ing them  upon  me.  In  desperation  i  tried 
other  kinds  of  pantomime,  but  the  more 
cigars  I  refused  the  more  and  more  rare 
and  precious  cigars  were  brought  out  of 
the  deeps  and  recesses  of  the  establish- 
[ii8] 


A  Tragedy  of  Twopence 

ment.     I  tried  in  vain  to  think  of  a  way  of 
conveying  to  him  the  fact  that  I  had  already 
had  the  cigar.     I  imitated  the  action  of  a 
citizen  smoking,  knocking  off  and  throwing 
away  a  cigar.    The  watchful  proprietor  only 
thought  I  was  rehearsing  (as  in  an  ecstasy 
of  anticipation)  the  joys  of  the  cigar  he  was 
going  to  give  me.     At  last  I  retired  baffled  : 
he  would  not  take  the  money  and  leave  the 
cigars  alone.    So  that  this  restaurant-keeper 
(in  whose  face  a  love  of  money  shone  like 
the  sun  at  noonday)  flatly  and  firmly   re- 
fused to  receive  the  twopence  that  I  cer- 
tainly owed  him  ;  and  I  took  that  twopence 
of  his  away  with  me  and  rioted  on  it  for 
months.     I  hope  that  on  the  last  day  the 
angels  will  break  the   truth  very  gently  to 
that  unhappy  man. 

***** 
This  is  the  true  and  exact  account  of  the 
■  reat  Cigar  Fraud,  and  the  moral  of  it  is 
t 'lis— that  civilization  is  founded  upon  ab- 


A  Tragedy  of  Twopence 

stractions.  The  idea  of  debt  is  one  which 
cannot  be  conveyed  by  physical  motions  at 
all,  because  it  is  an  abstract  idea.  And  civi- 
lization obviously  would  be  nothing  without 
debt.  So  when  hard-headed  fellows  who 
study  scientific  sociology  (which  does  not 
exist)  come  and  tell  you  that  civilization  is 
material  or  indiiferent  to  the  abstract,  just 
ask  yourselves  how  many  of  the  things  that 
make  up  our  Society,  the  Law,  or  the 
Stocks  and  Shares,  or  the  National  Debt, 
you  would  be  able  to  convey  with  your  face 
.and  your  ten  fingers  by  grinning  and  ges- 
ticulating to  a  German  innkeeper. 


[120] 


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